Village memory · Palestine

Barbara

بربرة

Gaza districtDepopulated 1948

Barbara, a grape-growing village in the coastal dunes south of Ascalon, kept a mosque holding the tomb of a fourteenth-century sage and was famed for its fruit and the long rugs woven by its women. It endured months of skirmishes before falling in the closing days of Operation Yoav in November 1948; rubble and old streets remain.

• 1 person