The Tomb Raiders.(grave robbery in West Bank)

Ahmed works the cave on his hands and knees, scooping up soil and then letting the sand sift through his fingers until he's left with a palm full of ancient relics. It's a meager assortment--broken pottery, chipped glass and the hollow clank of human bones. But it's enough for him to determine that this grotto, 15 feet underground, is a 2,000- year-old Roman burial cave and that the robbers, Palestinians who recently looted the site, made off with a trove of treasures. He should know. Ahmed is a grave robber himself who has mined dozens of ancient caves near his home in the West Bank town of Dahariya. But this was the work of fellow villagers. Above him, the desert sun streams through a hole in the rock, training a spotlight on a half dozen tombs that once contained sarcophaguses. "This is how people used to bury their dead," he says, pointing to the empty crypts, "with their most valuable belongings."

It's also how some Palestinians are now trying to eke out a living. Grave robbing has always been a problem in Israel and the West Bank, areas rich in archeological treasures. But since Israel sealed off the West Bank and Gaza at the start of fighting more than eight months ago, preventing 120,000 Palestinians from reaching jobs inside the Jewish state, pillaging has surged dramatically. Antiquity officials on both sides of the border talk of a 300 percent rise in incidents of tomb theft and worry that the raiders, who trade their spoils for money on the antiquities black market, are destroying layers of Moslem, Jewish, Roman and Byzantine history. "We've always known that the looting is directly linked to spikes in unemployment," says Mahmoud Jabareen, director of the Hebron Antiquities Department. "Now the numbers of both are going up and up."

Palestinian officials say as much as half the labor force in the West Bank and Gaza is out of work because of either the closure or the resulting economic downturn. Many Palestinians are living off handouts from the United Nations and other international agencies. Others have been stealing cars and even cattle from neighboring Israeli communities. But in towns like Dahariya, which sits on a hill pregnant with treasures, pilfering from the dead is as easy as digging up your own backyard.

Take Khaled (all the diggers' and dealers' names have been changed). One of Ahmed's neighbors in this town of 30,000 south of Hebron, he would cross the border into Israel every day to work at a construction job before fighting erupted. He comes from a family of farmers. On a small patch of land high up in the village, they grow chickpeas that are ground into hummus. During a drought a few years ago, when the crop dried up, Khaled borrowed a metal detector from a friend and occasionally combed the family field for riches. "I learned how to recognize, from the color of the topsoil and the vegetation, where there might be hollow spaces underground," he says, describing the telltale signs of a burial cave.

When Israel sealed the border, Khaled's grave robbing became more frequent and more systematic. Now he operates a six-man team, one of at least 15 in Dahariya alone, that digs throughout the area and sometimes just across the Israeli border that runs less than a mile from the village. Working at night with shovels and pickaxes, they cut through stone and tunnel into the parched earth to get to the tombs. "Sometimes you dig for weeks and find nothing," he says, palms up, exposing the scratches and the abrasions of his work. "And sometimes you stumble on to a collection of coins or oil lamps, where everything is perfectly preserved."

Even when they strike pay dirt, diggers like Khaled don't make much money. He sells his loot to a West Bank middleman who resells the treasures ...