You can find pretty much anything on eBay, but this one was a real surprise.
"A rare bronze statue of the Greek god Apollo has mysteriously resurfaced in the Gaza Strip, only to vanish almost immediately from view and be taken into police custody." (Via The Independent)
According to The International Business Times, it's believed the six-foot-tall statue is at least 2,000 years old.
A local fisherman says he found it on the ocean floor last year and hauled it home. It later appeared — very briefly — on eBay for a whopping half a million dollars.
Sounds like a lot, but Al Bawaba reports that's actually quite a bit less than the up to $40 million the statue could be worth.
Here's the thing though — archeologists haven't been able to study it further. That's because the Islamist group Hamas sent police to seize the statue and look into who it was that might have tried to sell it online.
Frustrated historians told The Jerusalem Post there's simply nothing like it.
"It's unique. I saw there is no price. There is no price. No way."
After the criminal investigation into who might have tried to sell it, Gaza's tourism ministry plans to display the statue to the public.
