Wadi Qelt

The 15,000 ha site has been recognised as an Important Bird Area (IBA) by BirdLife International because it supports populations of Eurasian eagle-owls, griffon vultures, Bonelli's eagles, and lesser kestrels.

The stream Chorath or Cherath, mentioned in 1 Kings 17:3 as one of the hiding places of the prophet Elijah, has been identified by some with Wadi Kelt at St. George's Monastery.

[citation needed] A tradition holds that this is the place in the desert where Joachim, the father of the Virgin Mary, has prayed to be blessed with a child and received the promise from God's angel, as narrated in the apocryphal Proto-Gospel of James.

[citation needed] St. George's Monastery,[4] also connected to the Marian tradition, is built into the wadi cliffs a short distance upstream from the Cave of St Anne.

Qubur Bani Isra'in are very large Bronze-Age stone structures, which rise from a rocky plateau overlooking Wadi Qelt.

[7] The winter palaces of Hasmonean kings and Herod the Great stood at the lower end of the valley, where it reaches the Plain of Jericho.

[15][16] Towards the end of the 1948 Palestine war and from the outset of the Arab-Israeli war that followed, the springs of Wadi Qelt, which supplied much of the water for Jericho were a primary target for Israel's biological warfare programme, designed, by contaminating waters with typhus and diphtheria bacteria, to block the advance of the Arab Legion into the area which, in the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, had been destined for the Arab population.

Some Bedouin and residents of Jericho are also earning their livelihood near the Monastery of St George, by offering donkey rides to pilgrims and selling them beverages and souvenirs.