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Yuval Peleg Killed in Archaeology Accident

Very sad news out of Israel today. Archaeologist Yuval Peleg was conducting a salvage excavation ahead of the construction of a road in the West Bank when he was killed by falling rocks.

From The Jerusalem Post:

A 46-year-old man was killed in an accident at an archaeological dig site between Homesh and Karnei Shomron in the West Bank on Thursday. He was later identified as Yuval Pelleg.
An initial investigation into the incident found that an Israeli and several Palestinian workers were digging at the entrance to a cave when rocks began falling down the mountain, trapping the man.
People on the scene succeeded in removing some of the rocks from on top of the man. A military medical crew attempted to resuscitate him while his lower half remained trapped under the rocks, but were forced to pronounce him dead on the scene.

From Jerusalem Online:

Gershon Mesika, the head of the Shomron Regional Council, stated, “In the framework of building a new road, a new cave was discovered. According to the procedure, an archaeologist was sent to survey the cave and to study it. Then, there was the disaster. We are sorry for the loss of the senior level archeologist doing research in Samaria.”

The Times of Israel has a map of the area in which was working. Jerusalem Online has a photo of the accident scene. Arutz-7 has another here. Robert Cargill has a photo of Yuval here. A lecture that he gave in 2012 about recent excavations at Qumran is online here. The preliminary report that he wrote with Yitzhak Magen of Qumran excavations from 1993 to 2004 is online here. Jim West notes that Yuval had a wife and two small children.

HT: Joseph Lauer

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