Dunum
دونم
The standard unit of land measurement in Palestine: one thousand square metres, or a tenth of a hectare. Roughly a quarter of an acre. Nearly every figure in the history of Palestinian land — ownership, cultivation, expropriation — is stated in dunums.
The word comes from the Ottoman dönüm, originally the amount of land a team of oxen could plough in a day — in practice a little more than 900 square metres in Ottoman Palestine, though the figure varied considerably from place to place. The British Mandate standardised it as the metric dunum of exactly 1,000 square metres — a tenth of a hectare, or about 0.247 of an acre — and that is the unit used in the Mandate’s Village Statistics, in Israeli land law, in Palestinian Authority planning documents and in United Nations reporting. Ten dunums make a hectare; a thousand make a square kilometre.
The unit is not a curiosity of measurement but the language in which the conflict over the country is conducted. The Mandate’s 1944–45 Village Statistics, compiled village by village, record for each locality the total area in dunums and its division between Arab, Jewish and public ownership, and the breakdown of land use — cereals, plantations, citrus, built-up, non-cultivable. Those tables are the basis of most modern estimates of what Palestinians owned in 1948. For Salama, near Jaffa, they show 6,782 dunums in total, of which 5,633 were Arab-owned, 885 Jewish and 264 public.
Every subsequent measure of dispossession has used the same unit. The land confiscations in the Galilee announced in 1975 — about 20,000 dunums around Sakhnin, Arraba and Deir Hanna — produced Land Day. Israeli declarations of “state land” in the West Bank, settlement master plans, the area enclosed between the separation barrier and the Green Line, the firing zones of the Jordan Valley and the South Hebron Hills, and the demolition and confiscation figures published each month by UN humanitarian monitors are all reported in dunums.
Reading Palestinian history therefore requires a working sense of the number. A village of a few thousand people typically held several thousand dunums. A family plot might be five or ten. Twenty thousand dunums is twenty square kilometres — enough to redraw the economic life of three towns, which is exactly what it did.
Sources
Cited works
3- en.wikipedia.org — Dunam(opens in a new tab)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunam
- palquest.org — salama(opens in a new tab)https://www.palquest.org/en/place/17133/salama
- ochaopt.org — area c key humanitarian concernsPDF(opens in a new tab)https://www.ochaopt.org/sites/default/files/area_c_key_humanitarian_concerns.pdf
Connected in the archive
21 connected records21 records elsewhere in the archive are linked to this one, each by a piece of evidence you can read below.
names this record — 16 records
One record names the other. A pointer for reading, not a claim that they belong to each other.
- 'Ajjurعَجُّور
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: The village held 58,074 dunums — 25,227 of them under cereals and 2,428 irrigated or planted as orchard.
- A land without a people for a people without a land
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: The Mandate government's own Village Statistics, 1945 (republished with explanatory notes by Sami Hadawi) recorded Jewish ownership at 1,491,699 dunums — 5.67 per cent of the country's total area — while of the cultivable land, Arabs held 84.7 per cent and Jews 12.8 per cent.
- Abdullah Nashwan
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: We owned a few dunums, where we planted wheat and barley.
- Abu Kishkأبو كِشْك
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: In 1944/45, 2,487 dunums of village land were planted with citrus and bananas and 14,018 were allotted to cereals, with 226 dunums irrigated or in orchards.
- Abu Shushaأبو شوشة
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: The 1931 census counted 831 inhabitants in 155 houses, and the British government's April 1945 survey estimated the population at 720. Village lands totaled 8,960 dunums, of which PalQuest and Palestine Remembered both record 5,883 as Arab-owned and 3,077 as public, with no Jewish ownership; 4,939 dunums were allotted to cereals and 931 were irrigated or used for orchards.
- Abu Shushaأبو شوشة
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: In 1944/45 it counted 870 people and 9,425 dunums, of which 2,475 were sown in cereals and 54 irrigated or planted in orchards; by then 6,337 dunums were in Jewish ownership.
- and 10 more
named in this record — 5 records
One record names the other. A pointer for reading, not a claim that they belong to each other.
- Green Line
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Israeli declarations of "state land" in the West Bank, settlement master plans, the area enclosed between the separation barrier and the Green Line, the firing zones of the Jordan Valley and the South Hebron Hills, and the demolition and confiscation figures published each month by UN humanitarian monitors are all reported in dunums.
- Jaffaيافا
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Those tables are the basis of most modern estimates of what Palestinians owned in 1948. For Salama, near Jaffa, they show 6,782 dunums in total, of which 5,633 were Arab-owned, 885 Jewish and 264 public.
- Land Day
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: The land confiscations in the Galilee announced in 1975 — about 20,000 dunums around Sakhnin, Arraba and Deir Hanna — produced Land Day.
- Land Day
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: The land confiscations in the Galilee announced in 1975 — about 20,000 dunums around Sakhnin, Arraba and Deir Hanna — produced Land Day.
- Sakhninسخنين
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: The land confiscations in the Galilee announced in 1975 — about 20,000 dunums around Sakhnin, Arraba and Deir Hanna — produced Land Day.
Cite this page
Every claim above carries its sources — citation is the point.
- Chicago
“Dunum.” Glossary, FALASTEEN.AI. Accessed 22 August 2026. https://falasteen.ai/glossary/dunum.- MLA
“Dunum.” Glossary, FALASTEEN.AI, 2026, https://falasteen.ai/glossary/dunum. Accessed 22 August 2026.- BibTeX
@misc{falasteen-dunum, title = {Dunum}, howpublished = {\url{https://falasteen.ai/glossary/dunum}}, organization = {FALASTEEN.AI — A Living Archive for Palestine}, year = {2026}, note = {Accessed 2026-08-22} }