Nissim Kahlon Cave House on Sidna Ali Beach Faces Eviction After Five Decades Carved Into the Herzliya Cliff

Below the minaret of Sidna Ali, where the sandstone cliff drops to the beach, there's a house nobody built with a permit. Nissim Kahlon, known across Israel as the Caveman, has spent about five decades carving it out of the rock by hand. It's a warren of rooms, passages, arches and balconies, its walls covered in mosaics of shells, pebbles, broken glass, tiles and whatever the sea washed up. The Hebrew press calls it Beit HaTzedef, the Shell House.

It is probably in its last season. In early September 2026, officials from the Environmental Protection Ministry and inspectors from the Israel Nature and Parks Authority came to the cave to prepare for evicting Kahlon and sealing the rooms. Reports at the end of September said the eviction would follow the autumn holidays.

How a tent became a labyrinth

Kahlon, now past 80, came to the beach in the 1970s and started with a tent. Then he started digging. The first chamber was about eight metres high and ten long, and he kept going. A demolition order came within a year or so. It was never carried out, and he carved deeper. He once left for what was meant to be a month in the United States and came back eight years later to find the place falling apart, then rebuilt and extended it.

Over the years the cave grew a living room, a lower room, a freshwater well about six metres deep, a vegetable patch and, for a short time, a café the authorities closed. Today he uses a walker and has a full-time carer, and he still talks to every visitor, inspector and politician who comes down the path.

Why the state wants it gone

The fight is old. The Environmental Protection Ministry's marine unit served an eviction warning in July 2023, and also ordered the city and the Israel Land Authority to close the cave complex and clear the beach. The ministry's case is that the structure was built illegally on public land, damages the coast and could bring down the public path along the top of the cliff. The state's court filings also said the complex takes up about ten metres of beach, enough to block passage at high tide.

That last point is not abstract in Herzliya. In February 2026 part of the cliff at Sidna Ali collapsed. Nobody was hurt, but Mayor Yariv Fisher warned that the city was close to closing its beaches and blamed years of underfunded cliff protection. The cave sits in exactly the stretch of coast everyone is worried about.

Kahlon says the opposite: his carvings have held up for fifty years while parts of the cliff around them have not. The court did not accept that. It ruled that he has to leave, treating the cave as public land taken for private use, and it rejected the city's proposal to turn the house into a public art museum on environmental and engineering grounds. The municipality, which at points backed recognising the cave as a heritage site, is now trying to find him somewhere else to live.

Seeing it, and the coast around it

For years the house has been one of the odd sights of the Herzliya coast, alongside the Sidna Ali mosque on the cliff above and the Crusader fortress at Apollonia National Park just to the north. Organised visits were still being offered in September, but access can end at any time. Stretches of this beach are also closed because of collapse risk, so obey the signs and don't walk under the cliff face.

If the rooms are sealed, the mosaics go with them. Whatever you think of a man occupying a public beach for half a century, this was one of the few places on the Israeli coast made entirely by one person's hands. The beaches themselves, which beach is which and where the lifeguards are, are in our beaches and marina guide.