Village memory · Palestine

Hunin

هونين

Safad districtDepopulated 1948

Hunin stood on Mount 'Amil above the Hula plain beside the Crusader castle of Chastel Neuf, and its people were Shia Muslims — one of a cluster of Shia villages in the Galilee panhandle. Most fled to Lebanon after a Palmach raid in May 1948, leaving about 400. In August the mukhtars offered to be citizens of Israel and were refused; on 2 September the army blew up twenty houses, killed the mukhtar's son and nineteen others, and expelled the rest. The castle is now a tourist attraction and the village school an agricultural warehouse.