The geography of the record

The Atlas

الأطلس

Every point below is a real coordinate. 427 villages depopulated in 1948, drawn where they stood — not as a symbol of the land, but as the land. 77 of them open into a full record here.

AcreAcreBir al-SabaBir al-SabaGaza CityGaza CityHaifaHaifaHebronHebronJaffaJaffaJerusalemJerusalemNablusNablusal-MajdalBethlehemBethlehemJeninJeninJerichoJerichoKhan YounisKhan YounisLyddaLyddaNazarethNazarethRafahRafahRamallahRamallahal-Ramlaal-RamlaSafadSafadTabariyyaTabariyyaTulkarmTulkarmBeit HanounBeit HanounDeir al-BalahDeir al-BalahJabaliaJabaliaQalqilyaQalqilya

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427 villages · 77 with records

Subdistrict

The index

village with a record here documented, record to come city or townBoundaries: Natural Earth (public domain) · Villages and city coordinates: Wikidata (CC0) · Place geocoding: © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL)
iHow to read this map

What the points are

Each gold point is a Palestinian village depopulated during and after the 1948 war, placed at the coordinate recorded for it. The brighter, ringed points are the villages for which this archive holds a written record — click one to read it. The rest are documented but still unwritten here; their names and their coordinates are the beginning of that work.

What the lines are

The coastline and land boundary are a modern approximation of the territory of Mandatory Palestine, not a digitisation of a Mandate-era survey sheet. The dashed line traces the 1949 Armistice Line — the Green Line — as generalised by Natural Earth. It is not a legal delimitation, and it is not the separation barrier, which this dataset does not contain and which we have not guessed at.

What is missing

This is not the complete list. Walid Khalidi's All That Remains documents more than four hundred villages; other counts run higher still, and some sites have no recorded coordinate at all. Population figures come from Wikidata and their census years vary, so read them as indicative rather than comparable. 5 of our own village records could not be matched to a mapped point and are listed in the build report.

iiGo deeper

This map is a way in, not a substitute for the archives that made it possible. Each of these holds far more than we do.

Visualizing Palestine & partners

Palestine Open Maps

Mandate-era Survey of Palestine sheets layered over the present, at full resolution. The single best tool for tracing a village to its exact ground.

Community archive

Palestine Remembered

Village-by-village records built from the testimony of the people who lived in them — photographs, family names, oral histories, land data.

Zochrot

Zochrot — the villages database

Field surveys of what physically remains at each site: a wall, a cactus hedge, a cemetery, a spring.

United Nations

UN OCHA — Maps and graphics

Access and movement maps, barrier route maps, humanitarian dashboards for the West Bank and Gaza.

Visualizing Palestine

Visualizing Palestine

Data-driven infographics: settlements, the wall, water, prisoners, the blockade.

National Library of Israel

Survey of Palestine maps — National Library of Israel

The original 1940s survey sheets, digitized at high resolution — the base layer most researchers work from.

iiiWhere this data comes from
Natural Earth
Land, coastline, national boundaries at 1:10m
Public domain
Wikidata
Depopulated villages of 1948 and city coordinates
CC0 1.0
OpenStreetMap contributors
Geocoding of the places in this archive (via Nominatim)
ODbL 1.0 — attribution required