Fursan Hanani crouches into a dark, cool underground cavern, taking shelter from the scorching sun in his village of Khirbet Tana, east of the Palestinian town of Beit Furik in the northern occupied West Bank district of Nablus. An old, dirty mattress and van door the sixty-seven-year-old retrieved from a junkyard are erected on metal poles, creating a shaded path to the cave’s entrance. Hanani warmly waves me into the compact space, burrowed into the parched hill. “Ahlan wa sahlan,” he says, a traditional Arabic phrase meaning “welcome.”

Mattresses and blankets are piled in the corner and a dusty mirror is hanging on the cavern’s exterior. “The Israelis can’t reach us underground,” says Hanani, whose permanent, stone home has been razed by Israeli authorities several times over the years. The entrance to this cave has also been dismantled on a few occasions, along with his container homes and tents.

The further Hanani retreats into these ancient caves that protrude from the hills in Khirbet Tana, the safer he feels. There are some forty families who reside in Khirbet Tana, consisting of about two hundred fifty people, many of whom are closely related. They are shepherds, a traditional livelihood practiced here for generations.