Hebron

Overview

Hebron is an ancient city in Judea and Samaria, about 32 kilometers south of Jerusalem. Among the world’s oldest continuously inhabited cities, it has been a center of religious worship for more than two millennia. Its importance in Judaism rests above all on the Cave of the Patriarchs, which the biblical account identifies as the burial place of Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, and Jacob and Leah. Hebron is also where David was anointed King of Judah and ruled for seven years before becoming King of all Israel. These traditions make the city a major place in Jewish religious and historical memory.

Hebron is inhabited by Arabs and Jews, and the Cave is sacred to Muslims as well as Jews. Its Hebrew name is commonly associated with a word for friend; its Arabic name, Al-Khalil, means the friend. Both names are linked to Abraham, regarded in the two traditions as a friend of God. The city’s shared religious significance has shaped its buildings and patterns of worship, while violence and changing governments have repeatedly altered access to its holy places.

Hebron’s Jewish community endured across many historical periods. Arab mobs murdered 67 Jews in the 1929 Hebron massacre, forcing survivors from the city. Jordan barred Jewish residence and worship during its rule from 1948 to 1967. Jewish families returned after the Six-Day War. Later agreements divided security responsibilities within Hebron, while attacks on residents and worshippers made protection of the Cave and its approaches a continuing concern.

Geography

Hebron stands in the Judean hills, south of Jerusalem, across several hills and wadis that generally run from north to south. Its historic core surrounds the Cave of the Patriarchs, also called the Tomb of Machpelah. The ancient settlement was situated at Tel Rumeida, or Tel Hebron, southwest of the present city center. The location connects a long inhabited hilltop with the monumental religious precinct that became the focus of later construction and pilgrimage.

Archaeology at Tel Hebron gives physical depth to the city’s history. Excavations opened to visitors in October 2018 exposed walls from the Early and Middle Bronze Age. First Temple period workshops included wine presses, olive presses and pottery kilns. Excavators also found jars bearing ancient Hebrew inscriptions reading “to the king of Hebron.” These remains illuminate Hebron’s roles as a fortified settlement, a place of production and an administrative center during antiquity.

Ancient and biblical history

The Book of Genesis records Abraham buying the Cave of the Patriarchs from Ephron the Hittite for 400 shekels of silver in the presence of witnesses. He acquired it as a burial place for Sarah and his family. In the biblical account, that purchase is the first parcel of land owned by the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland. The burial tradition associates the Cave with three patriarchal couples: Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, and Jacob and Leah. Its meaning in Jewish history therefore joins a recorded land purchase to generations of family memory and worship.

The Bible also names Hebron Kiryat Arba. Following Saul’s death, David went to Hebron and was anointed King of Judah there. He ruled from the city for seven years before the elders of Israel anointed him king over all Israel. Hebron belonged to the united Israelite kingdom and later to the Kingdom of Judah, which fell to Babylon in 586 BCE. The city’s place in accounts of the patriarchs and David links it to both the beginnings of Jewish ancestral history and the emergence of Israelite kingship.

Jewish life continued in Hebron after the loss of the Kingdom of Judah, and the city later entered the Hasmonean kingdom. King Herod, who reigned from 37 to 4 BCE, built the base of the present enclosure over the Cave of the Patriarchs. Its roughly 12-meter-high stone wall remains a defining part of the structure. Hebron saw fighting during the Jewish revolt against Rome, yet Jewish residence continued into the Byzantine period. Remains of a synagogue attest to that later community, while Byzantine rulers built a church over the Cave within the earlier Herodian enclosure.

After the Arab conquest in 638, the Byzantine church over the Cave was converted into a mosque. Crusaders captured Hebron in 1100, expelled its Jewish community and converted the mosque into a church. Jewish residence was reestablished after the Mamluk conquest in 1260, when the church was converted back into a mosque. A Mamluk decree in 1266 barred Jews and Christians from entering the Cave; Jews could approach only steps outside the enclosure. Changes in rule thus changed the site’s religious use and the ability of Jews to reach the burial place central to their tradition.

Jewish history

Jewish families lived in Hebron across successive centuries. During the Ottoman period, arrivals from elsewhere in the Land of Israel and from Jewish communities abroad joined local residents, and Hebron developed as a center of religious study. Its longstanding Sephardi community spoke Arabic and maintained cultural ties with Arab neighbors. This rooted community formed a distinct part of city life well before modern Jewish national politics. Later students of the Slobodka Yeshiva lived largely apart from both the older Sephardi community and Hebron’s Arab population.

That history matters to understanding the victims of 1929. Many Jews attacked in Hebron belonged to older religious families whose roots in the city reached back generations and who had little or no connection to Zionism, the Jewish national movement for self-determination in its historical homeland. The massacre occurred before the State of Israel existed, before Israeli rule in Judea and Samaria, and before the Jewish communities established there after 1967. The attackers did not spare families because they were longstanding residents.

Violence began amid unrest in Jerusalem. Fighting after a Muslim prayer service on the Temple Mount killed three Jews and three Arabs one day before the assault on Hebron began. Haj Amin al-Husseini spread false claims that Jews intended to take over the Temple Mount and build a Third Temple. Arab mobs began attacking Hebron’s Jews on the night of August 23, 1929; the assault intensified on August 24 and continued across three days. Attackers searched homes for Jews and murdered 67 people. Homes and synagogues were damaged or destroyed. Some Arab neighbors sheltered Jews, making different choices from the mobs.

Several hundred Jewish survivors were relocated to Jerusalem. American witnesses accused British police of being absent or standing idle while Jews were attacked. British authorities initially resisted providing food rations to 400 survivors after the massacre. Arabic-language press accounts denied atrocities and mutilations before photographs of victims reached the Jewish public; those photographs arrived ten months after they were taken. The killings drove out a community that had lived in Hebron for centuries and became a defining event in the city’s modern Jewish history.

Thirty-one Jewish families returned in 1931, but British authorities evacuated them in 1936 amid fear of another massacre. During the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, Jordan’s Arab Legion captured Hebron. From 1948 until the Six-Day War in 1967, Jordan barred Jews from living in the city and from visiting or praying at its Jewish holy sites. Jordanian authorities and local residents razed the Jewish Quarter, desecrated the Jewish cemetery and built an animal pen on the ruins of the Avraham Avinu synagogue.

After Israel gained control of Hebron in 1967, Jews sought to restore residence and worship there. On April 4, 1968, a group registered at Hebron’s Park Hotel. The next day they announced that they had come to reestablish the city’s Jewish community. Prime Minister Levi Eshkol’s government moved the group to a nearby Israel Defense Forces compound while Kiryat Arba was built. The return followed the forced departure of Hebron’s earlier community and the exclusion of Jews during Jordanian rule. Jewish families later restored a residential presence within Hebron itself.

Modern history

Hebron’s historic center remained a place of intense religious and political attention after 1967. The Cave of the Patriarchs continued to serve Jewish and Muslim worshippers under arrangements governing access and security. Its significance to both communities made the protection of worship a central issue in negotiations. The Oslo Accords and later Hebron arrangements included commitments concerning security and respect for worship at the site.

In February 1994, Baruch Goldstein carried out a massacre of Muslim worshippers at the Cave of the Patriarchs. A Temporary International Presence in Hebron operated from May to August that year, then withdrew when its mandate was not extended. A later agreement restored the presence as part of the arrangements surrounding Hebron. On January 28, 2019, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declined to renew its mandate; the mission ended on January 31.

The Hebron redeployment envisaged under the Israeli–PLO interim agreement was delayed beyond its original timetable. Negotiations resolved the issue in January 1997. Signed on January 17, the Hebron Protocol required Israeli military redeployment within ten days. It set different security responsibilities for two parts of the city: Arab police responsibilities in H-1, and Israeli responsibility for internal security and public order in H-2, alongside Israel’s continuing responsibility for the overall security of Israelis. The protocol also provided for coordinated patrols, checkpoints and measures to prevent hostile acts.

A Joint Coordination Center at Har Manoah was established to coordinate security measures involving both sides. The protocol addressed movement near areas under Israeli security responsibility and arrangements at holy sites. Its detailed provisions reflected the difficulty of protecting residents and worshippers in a city where religious sites, homes and security routes stand close together. The arrangements remained significant to everyday movement and security long after the ten-day redeployment period.

On July 7, 2017, UNESCO designated Hebron’s Old City, including the Cave of the Patriarchs, a World Heritage Site in Danger under an Arab national designation that ignored the site’s ancient Jewish connection. The American Jewish Committee had urged World Heritage Committee members to reject the proposal, citing Hebron’s Jewish heritage and prior commitments on the city’s governance and shared worship. The Cave’s biblical association with Abraham and the patriarchal and matriarchal burial tradition are essential to understanding the site’s historical significance.

Security

Attacks on Jews in and around Hebron continued after Jewish residence was restored. On May 2, 1980, terrorists murdered six Jews returning from prayers at the Cave of the Patriarchs and wounded 20 others. On August 31, 2004, two suicide bombers sent by a Hamas network in Hebron blew themselves up on buses in Beersheba, killing 16 people and injuring about 100. Hamas is a terrorist organization; its Hebron networks have used the district to prepare and carry out attacks beyond the city.

By 2010, Hamas was working to restore attack infrastructure around Hebron and Yatir. On August 31 that year, a Hamas attack on an Israeli vehicle near Kiryat Arba killed four people. Security operations in the Hebron district also targeted Hamas institutions and seized weapons, including explosive belts. Local Arab security services mounted coordinated activity against Hamas organizations, preparing 585 personnel drawn from the presidential guard, national security, intelligence and police. American aid supplied 145 vehicles for reinforcements deployed in the district.

The approaches to the Cave of the Patriarchs have been targets for knife attacks and attempted attacks. On September 5, 2016, Israeli security forces arrested two youths carrying large knives at the site; they stated an intention to stab and shoot Israeli Jews. During September 6–12, 2017, security forces arrested three knife carriers in separate incidents at checkpoints near the Cave. One was detained on September 6, another after a knife was found in a search on September 8, and a roughly 15-year-old youth after a knife was found concealed under his shirt on September 12. Checkpoints around the holy site form part of the response to this repeated threat.

In June 2025, Shin Bet dismantled a large Hamas attack network in Hebron. Its operatives had trained to use firearms, gather intelligence on Israeli targets, manufacture explosives and assemble improvised explosive devices. Israeli forces arrested more than 60 suspects and confiscated 22 firearms and 11 grenades. On June 25, a joint IDF, Shin Bet and police operation found a bomb laboratory near Hebron, arrested five wanted suspects and seized bomb-making materials. The scale, training and equipment of the network showed organized capability to plan attacks in Judea and Samaria and elsewhere in Israel.

Present day

Hebron remains a city of Arab and Jewish residents, with the Cave of the Patriarchs at the center of its religious life. Its Jewish community maintains homes and institutions in a city where the memory of the 1929 massacre, the years of exclusion under Jordan and the return after 1967 remain closely connected. The Hebron Fund supports parks, libraries, youth programs and cultural events for Jewish residents and helps finance preservation and protection of the entrance to the Tomb of Machpelah.

The city’s archaeological remains, ancient enclosure and living places of worship draw visitors interested in biblical history and later periods of Jewish, Christian and Muslim rule. Tel Hebron’s excavated walls, workshops and Hebrew inscriptions provide material evidence alongside the written record. The Cave’s enduring place in Jewish history begins with Abraham’s purchase and the burial tradition; David’s reign and centuries of Jewish residence add further layers. Hebron’s present life is inseparable from that long history and from the security arrangements governing access to its holy places.