Four Qurnawis were shot dead in 1998 trying to stop the authorities from bulldozing their homes in a relocation scheme.
Some 10,000 people were eventually moved when almost an entire hillside of mud-brick homes was demolished despite protests from UNESCO.
In the now deserted moonscape, Ragab Tolba, 55, one of the last remaining residents, told AFP how his relatives and neighbours were moved to "inadequate" homes "in the desert".
The Qurnawis' dogged resistance was fired by their deep connection to the place and their ancestors, said the Qurna-born excavator Daramalli.
But the controversial celebrity archaeologist Hawass, then head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, said "it had to be done" to preserve the tombs.
Egyptologist Hanna, however, said the authorities were bent on turning Luxor into a sanitised "open-air museum... a Disneyfication of heritage", and used old tropes about the Qurnawis being tomb raiders against them.
Sayed Abdel Rasoul's nephew, Ahmed, hit back at what he called a double standard.
"The French and the English were all stealing," he told AFP.
"Who told the people of Qurna they could make money off of artefacts in the first place?"