Tuqu'

Tuquʿ or Tequʿ (Arabic: تقوع) is a Palestinian town in the Bethlehem Governorate, located 12 km (7.5 mi) southeast of Bethlehem in the occupied West Bank. The modern part of the town was built up in 1948 adjacent to Khirbet Tuqu' (khirbet meaning "ruins"), the Arabic name for the ancient biblical site of Tekoa (Hebrew: תְּקוֹעַ, romanized: Təqōaʿ), or Crusader Thecoe. Both the ancient and modern sites are part of the Tuqu' municipal council, which includes two other localities: Khirbet ad-Deir ("ruins of the monastery") and Al-Halqum. As of 2019, the modern center of Tuqu' had a population of 8,767, Khirbet Tuqu' of 131, Al -Halqum of 266, and Khirbet ad-Deir of 2,009. Tuqu' forms part of a wider village cluster - along with Za'atara, Beit Ta'mir, Hindaza, Nuaman, Ubeidiya, and al-Asakra - that the nomadic pastoralist Ta'amreh tribe of Palestinian Bedouins have lived in and around for more than a millennium, and their history is intimately tied to both ancient and modern Tuqu'/Tekoa. Archaeological finds from Khirbet Teqoa include pottery from Iron Age IIA–IIC, Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman periods, as well as remains of a Byzantine-era church built over a tomb tradition attributed to the biblical prophet Amos, or by another tradition, to Saint Nicholas. The site remained inhabited into the Middle Ages, with the remains of a Crusader fortress, and with villagers later paying taxes on agricultural produce under Ottoman rule that were directed to a waqf. While Tuqu has a municipal jurisdiction of over 191,262 dunams, the built-up area is small, consisting of only 590 dunams, and 98.5% of the village's land was classified as Area C and 1.5% as Area B in the 1995 accords. The Israeli settlement of Tekoa, initially established in 1975 as a Nahal military outpost, was built on 1071 dunams of land...