Memory

Depopulated 1949

Al-Faluja was the anchor of the besieged 'Faluja pocket,' where Egyptian forces — among them a young Gamal Abdel Nasser — held out through the winter of 1948–49. Weeks after the Egyptian withdrawal under the armistice, the town's remaining civilians were driven out and its houses destroyed.

Depopulated 1950

Al-Majdal (Majdal Asqalan) was a market town of some ten thousand people, famed for its weaving, on the coastal plain north of Gaza. Captured in November 1948, its remaining residents were held under military rule and finally expelled to Gaza in 1950; the town became the Israeli city of Ashkelon's Migdal quarter.

Depopulated 1948

Al-Muharraqa was a small barley-growing village east of Gaza whose lands had been waqf endowments for Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock. Raided with Kaufakha in late May 1948, its people were driven out, and in mid-August — during the second truce — Israeli forces mined and destroyed the village.

Depopulated 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.

Depopulated 1948

Bayt Darras was a farming town northeast of Gaza, defended by Sudanese troops and local militiamen until the Givati Brigade overran it in May 1948. Its people fled south into the Gaza Strip, where their descendants live in refugee camps to this day.

Depopulated 1948

Burayr, one of the largest grain-growing villages of the Gaza coast, twice drove off attackers in early 1948 before the Palmach's Negev Brigade seized it in a single night in May, days before the Mandate ended. Five Israeli settlements were planted on its lands; scattered cactuses and the trace of its streets mark the site.

Depopulated 1948

Hamama — 'dove' in Arabic — was one of the largest villages of the Gaza district, over five thousand people spread in a star pattern along the roads north of Gaza. Harassed from neighboring Nitzanim through early 1948 and swollen with refugees, it was occupied in late October 1948 during Operation Yoav; no trace of its houses remains.

Depopulated 1948

Hulayqat was a small village northeast of Gaza, taken in May 1948, retaken by the Egyptian army in July, and finally captured a second time in October during Operation Yoav. Its ruin, partly forested with sycamore and Christ's-thorn, lies in the corridor where the Egyptian front was cut in two.

Depopulated 1948

Isdud — ancient Ashdod — was a market town of nearly five thousand on the coastal highway north of Gaza, with two mosques, three shrines, schools, a train station, and a Wednesday market. It was the Egyptian army's northernmost stand of 1948, falling in late October during Operation Yoav; modern Ashdod rose on its lands.

Depopulated 1948

Julis, set on a wadi bank beside a road junction and a British military camp on the Gaza coast highway, fell to the Giv'ati Brigade around the first truce of 1948 and then held against the Egyptian counterattack in which Gamal Abdel Nasser served as staff officer. A few cement houses remain beside the old camp.

Depopulated 1948

Kaufakha was a farming village east of Gaza, founded by Gaza city families in the late nineteenth century around a well-known mosque. Its people repeatedly asked to surrender and stay, to no avail: the Palmach's Negev Brigade expelled them in late May 1948. Only the mosque remains, used as a stable and fodder store.

Depopulated 1948

Najd — its name means 'elevated ground' — was a small farming village northeast of Gaza whose children walked to school in Simsim. Its people were expelled by the Palmach's Negev Brigade on 13 May 1948, two days before the Mandate ended; Sderot was founded on its lands in 1951.

Depopulated 1948

Qastina stood on the highway between al-Majdal and the Jerusalem–Jaffa road, its 890 people farming grain and citrus beside the British camp at Beer Tuvia. The Giv'ati Brigade seized it days after the first truce ended, in July 1948; Kiryat Malakhi and several settlements later rose on its lands.

Depopulated 1948

Simsim, a circular village of gardens and deep wells northeast of Gaza and the hometown of a leader of the 1936 revolt, was captured and emptied by the Palmach's Negev Brigade in mid-May 1948, a day after neighboring Burayr fell. The site was obliterated; only cypress and sycamore trees mark it.

Depopulated 1948

Summil, a grain and sheep village on a wadi-ringed sandy hill whose revenues the Mamluks once endowed to Hebron's Ibrahimi mosque, fell in the Giv'ati Brigade's push south during the 'Ten Days' of July 1948, its people most likely driven toward Hebron. A length of old wall and a cactus-lined road remain.

Depopulated 1948

Al-Bassa was a large, prosperous Muslim-Christian village on the Lebanese border — a regional market center with schools, churches, and mosques. Punished by the British with a massacre in 1938, it was stormed by the Haganah in May 1948 and almost completely razed; its ruins lie inside Shlomi and Betzet.

Depopulated 1948

Al-Birwa, on a rocky hill east of Acre, was a farming village of some 1,500 people — Muslims and Christians — and the birthplace of the poet Mahmoud Darwish. Captured in July 1948, it was destroyed almost entirely; a school, two shrines, and three houses are all that remain.

Depopulated 1948

Al-Damun was a village on the Na'amin River southeast of Acre, home of the Zayadina clan before they rose to rule the Galilee. Captured in July 1948 during Operation Dekel and razed, its people became mostly internal refugees in nearby Tamra and Kabul; its cemetery and ruined waterworks remain in the undergrowth.

Depopulated 1948

Al-Ghabisiyya was a village northeast of Acre that had a non-aggression pact with its Jewish neighbors — yet the Carmeli Brigade attacked it anyway in May 1948. Its people fought for years in Israel's courts to return, and lost; only the mosque and cemetery remain, and villagers still pray outside the sealed mosque.

Depopulated 1948

Al-Kabri was a stone village northeast of Acre whose famous springs supplied the city's water through Ottoman aqueducts. Punished for the ambush of the Yehiam convoy, it was occupied in Operation Ben-Ami in May 1948 and leveled; today only rubble and the cemetery remain, beside the kibbutz that took its name.

Depopulated 1948

Al-Zeeb was a fishing and farming village on the coast north of Acre, built over the Canaanite city of Akzib. It was taken on 14 May 1948 in Operation Ben-Ami, in the last hours of the British Mandate. Its domed mosque and the mukhtar's house still stand in the Achziv recreation area, beside kibbutzim founded on its lands.

Depopulated 1948

Amqa was a small Muslim village in the hills northeast of Acre, identified with the Talmudic Kefar Amiqo. It was captured in July 1948 during Operation Dekel and largely destroyed — only its mosque and school were left standing, used as warehouses by the moshav founded on its lands.

Depopulated 1948

Iqrit was a Greek Catholic village in the northern Galilee whose residents left in November 1948 on the army's promise that they could return within weeks. Israel's Supreme Court ruled their evacuation illegal — but on Christmas Eve 1951 the village was demolished, and the people of Iqrit have been fighting to go home ever since.

Depopulated 1948

Kuwaykat lay nine kilometres northeast of Acre on some of the most fertile land in the subdistrict, 1,050 people holding 4,733 dunums in 1944/45. Its militia repulsed attacks in January, February and June 1948; on the night the first truce ended, 9 July, the village was shelled without warning during Operation Dekel and its people fled. Kibbutz Beit HaEmek was founded on its lands in January 1949.

Depopulated 1948

Suhmata stood on two hilltops at six hundred metres in the upper Galilee, a village of 1,130 Muslims and Christians holding 17,056 dunums in 1944/45, with a Byzantine church of 555 CE and a Crusader castle on its ground. It was bombed from the air on 28 October 1948 and taken on 30 October by the Golani Brigade's First Battalion during Operation Hiram. The site was renamed Tzuriel and made ready for Jewish immigrants by May 1949.

Depopulated 1948

Tarshiha was a large Muslim-Christian town of the upper Galilee, a tobacco-growing and craft center, bombed and captured in Operation Hiram in late October 1948. Most of its people fled or were driven into Lebanon, but several hundred remained or returned; its old core survives inside the merged city of Ma'alot-Tarshiha.

Depopulated 1948

Al-Qabu was a small hilltop village west of Jerusalem, its stone houses ringed by terraces of olives and grain. Captured in October 1948 during Operation Ha-Har, it was destroyed, and moshav Mevo Betar was later built on its lands.

Depopulated 1948

Al-Qastal was a tiny village on a commanding hill above the Jaffa–Jerusalem road. In April 1948 it became the pivot of the battle for Jerusalem: Palmach troops seized it during Operation Nachshon, and Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni, the best-known Palestinian commander of the war, was killed trying to win it back.

Depopulated 1948

Al-Walaja, a terraced village of springs and olive groves west of Jerusalem, was emptied in October 1948 — but its people rebuilt on the fragment of their lands that fell on the West Bank side of the armistice line. Today the rebuilt village is hemmed in by settlements and nearly ringed by the separation barrier.

Depopulated 1948

Deir al-Hawa was a tiny hamlet on a high ridge west of Jerusalem — sixty people in 1945, a mosque, and a shrine for a local sage. The Har'el Brigade captured it in October 1948 during Operation Ha-Har and it was obliterated; a Jewish National Fund park now spreads over its lands.

Depopulated 1948

Deir Yassin, a small village west of Jerusalem, was the site of the best-known massacre of the 1948 war, when Irgun and Lehi fighters killed more than a hundred villagers on 9 April 1948. Its name became shorthand for the terror that drove Palestinian flight.

Depopulated 1948

Ein Karem, a spring-fed village in the Jerusalem hills venerated as the birthplace of John the Baptist, was the largest village of the Jerusalem district until its capture in July 1948. It survived the war with its houses intact — an emptied village that is now a picturesque Jerusalem neighborhood.

Depopulated 1948

Lifta, at the western gateway to Jerusalem, was emptied of its roughly 3,000 residents in the first months of 1948. Its stone houses still stand in the valley below the highway, making it the most visibly surviving depopulated Palestinian village and a focus of return and preservation campaigns.

Depopulated 1948

Qaluniyya was a village on the Jerusalem–Jaffa highway whose name preserved the Roman Colonia founded on the ruins of Jewish Motza. Days after Deir Yassin, in April 1948, Haganah forces entered and blew up fifty of its houses; its ruins lie beside Motza, and Mevaseret Zion spreads over its lands.

Depopulated 1948

Suba stood on a conical hill above the Jerusalem–Tel Aviv road, its stone houses built among the ruins of a Crusader castle. Captured in July 1948 during Operation Danny, it survives as one of the more complete village ruins in the Jerusalem corridor, within a national park beside Kibbutz Tzova.

Depopulated 1948

Al-Sindiyana, the 'evergreen oak' village, stood on high ground twenty-nine kilometers south of Haifa, where Napoleon fought a battle in 1799. It was depopulated on 12 May 1948, in the last days of the Mandate; its fenced site is now grazing land strewn with the rubble of its houses.

Depopulated 1948

Al-Tira, seven kilometres south of Haifa on the western slopes of Mount Carmel, was the most populous village of its subdistrict, with 5,270 people and 45,262 dunums in 1944/45, and the district's largest olive producer. An Irgun raid on 12 December 1947 killed thirteen villagers; after a siege of more than two months the village fell on 16 July 1948 under naval bombardment. Tirat Karmel was built on the site in 1949.

Depopulated 1948

Ayn Ghazal, on the wooded slopes of Mount Carmel south of Haifa, held out with Jaba and Ijzim in the 'little triangle' until late July 1948. Its people were expelled toward Jenin and Tulkarm, and its lands became moshav farmland and JNF forest.

Depopulated 1948

Ayn Hawd, a Carmel hillside village south of Haifa said to descend from a commander of Saladin, was depopulated in July 1948. Its houses were never demolished: they became the Ein Hod artists' colony and its mosque a restaurant — while villagers who stayed built a new, long-unrecognized Ayn Hawd nearby.

Depopulated 1948

Balad al-Shaykh, seven kilometres from Haifa, was the second largest village of its subdistrict with 4,120 people in 1944/45, and holds the grave of Izz al-Din al-Qassam. On 31 December 1947 a Palmach force of 170 men attacked it under orders to harm the largest possible number of men; more than sixty villagers were left for dead, women and children among them. The village was taken by the Carmeli Brigade on 24 April 1948 and is now Tel Hanan, part of Nesher.

Depopulated 1948

Ijzim, one of the richest villages of the Carmel coast and seat of the al-Madi family, held out with two neighbors for months against Jewish forces, blocking the Tel Aviv–Haifa road. It finally fell on 24 July 1948 in Operation Shoter — a 'police action' launched during a truce — after a two-day bombardment that an Israeli officer said left 200 dead.

Depopulated 1948

Jaba' was a village on the western slopes of Mount Carmel whose fighters blocked the coast road for months in 1948. It asked to negotiate a surrender and got no answer; days into the second truce it was taken in Operation Shoter, and its people fled or were expelled. A lone shrine still stands over the rubble.

Depopulated 1948

Kafr Lam was a small grain-farming village on the coast south of Haifa, crowded inside the walls of an early Islamic ribat that the Crusaders called Cafarlet. Cleared of its people by July 1948, it escaped demolition thanks to its ruins; the fortress and several houses still stand within the moshav of HaBonim.

Depopulated 1948

Tantura, a coastal village south of Haifa, was captured in May 1948, when scores of its residents were killed — a massacre documented in Teddy Katz's contested thesis and revisited by Alon Schwarz's 2022 documentary "Tantura." The site now lies beneath the beaches of Dor.

Depopulated 1948

Abu Shusha stood on the southern slope of Tall Jazar — ancient Gezer — eight and a half kilometres southeast of Ramla, with 870 people and 9,425 dunums in 1944/45. The Givati Brigade mortared and stormed it on 13–14 May 1948 during Operation Barak; research by Birzeit University puts the number killed at around sixty, and a mass grave holding fifty-two skeletons was uncovered on the site in 1995.

Depopulated 1948

Al-Sarafand — Sarafand al-Kharab — was a citrus village beside the great British camp on the Ramla plain, burned by British forces in the late 1920s and rebuilt, only to be emptied in April 1948 as fighting closed in. Nes Ziona has spread over its lands, but many houses and the village school remain.

Depopulated 1948

Bayt Nabala looked out over the plain around Lydda from a rocky hill east of the airport, 2,310 people holding 15,051 dunums in 1944/45. On 13 July 1948 Israeli soldiers drove much of the expelled population of Lydda towards it while it was still in Arab hands; the village fell within days, during Operation Dani, and was demolished on 13 September 1948. Its people scattered to Ramallah, Deir Ammar, Rantis and the Jalazone camp.

Depopulated 1967

Bayt Nuba was the third of the Latrun villages, with Imwas and Yalu. Israeli forces took the salient in the first hours of the June 1967 war; that night the inhabitants of all three villages — some 12,000 people — were ordered out, and the built-up area of Bayt Nuba was afterwards destroyed by military demolition. Mevo Horon was established on its lands in 1970, and the site lies within Canada Park.

Depopulated 1948

Dayr Ayyub, a hamlet on the slopes above the Ramla–Jerusalem highway that revered the tomb of the prophet Job, changed hands repeatedly in the Latrun battles of 1948 and ended the war depopulated near the armistice line. No settlement was built on its lands; the eastern edge of Canada Park lies over the site.

Depopulated 1967

Imwas, widely identified with the biblical Emmaus, survived two thousand years of empires before Israeli forces expelled its residents and bulldozed the village in June 1967. Its site lies inside Canada Park, beside the ruins of Emmaus Nicopolis.

Depopulated 1967

Yalo stood in the Latrun salient on the road from Ramla to Jerusalem until June 1967, when its people were expelled and the village bulldozed together with Imwas and Bayt Nuba. Its lands now lie inside Canada Park, planted over the ruins.

Depopulated 1948

Yibna — biblical Jabneel, Roman Jamnia, seat of the Sanhedrin after Jerusalem's destruction — was a town of over five thousand with a station on the Gaza–Lydda railway and a mosque praised by medieval geographers. It fell in early June 1948 as Israeli forces pushed south; its mosque and shrine stand dilapidated beside modern Yavne.

Depopulated 1948

Al-Khayriyya — the Assyrian Banai Berka and Roman Beneberak, renamed 'the good, the giving' under the Mandate to distinguish it from Bnei Brak — dug trenches against attack from December 1947 before the Alexandroni Brigade seized it on 29 April 1948 in the encirclement of Jaffa. A handful of houses and a school survive within Giv'atayim's suburbs.

Depopulated 1948

Al-Manshiyya was the mixed Arab-Jewish quarter of Jaffa on the seafront north of the harbor. It fell to the Irgun in late April 1948 after a battle that drew in British armor, and its ruined streets were erased for a planned business district; the Hassan Bek Mosque and two other buildings are all that remain.

Depopulated 1948

Al-Shaykh Muwannis stood on a sandstone rise north of the Awja river, a citrus village of 1,930 people holding 15,972 dunums in 1944/45, whose leaders had reached a truce understanding with the Haganah. In March 1948 the Irgun kidnapped five of its notables; the village emptied on 30 March. Tel Aviv University stands on its land, and the sheikh's Green House is the university's faculty club.

Depopulated 1948

Beit Dajan — biblical Beth Dagon — stood at the crossroads south of Jaffa, a citrus village of nearly four thousand people with two schools. Raided through the winter of 1948, it fell in Operation Hametz at the end of April; a moshav took its name and its lands, and one surviving house serves as a synagogue.

Depopulated 1948

Salama, the largest village on Jaffa's eastern approaches and home of the shrine of the Prophet's companion Salama Abu Hashim, fought off attack after attack from December 1947 — the Haganah's own history calls its December assault 'the first attack on an Arab village' — before falling on 29 April 1948. Its mosque, shrine, and shuttered houses stand inside Tel Aviv's sprawl.

Depopulated 1948

Yazur — the Azuru of Sennacherib's annals and the birthplace of a Fatimid vizier — was bombed and raided for months from December 1947 before falling at the end of April 1948, as Operation Hametz encircled Jaffa. Two shrines and scattered houses still stand among the apartment blocks of Azor and Holon.

Depopulated 1948

Al-Khisas, on a terrace in the northern Hula plain, was raided by a Haganah strike force on the night of 18 December 1947 — one of the first such operations of the war. Houses were blown up and about a dozen civilians killed, four of them children by Benny Morris's figures, ten including five children according to the New York Times. Those who stayed on were finally driven out by army trucks at midnight on 5 June 1949 and dumped on a hillside near Akbara.

Depopulated 1948

Ayn al-Zaytun stood a kilometre and a half north of Safad and was treated as its suburb; 820 people held 1,100 dunums in 1944/45. Palmach troops took it on 1 May 1948 as a prelude to the capture of Safad, and thirty-seven men held as prisoners were probably among some seventy people killed in a gully between the village and the city. The houses were blown up on 2 and 3 May in full view of Safad.

Depopulated 1948

Kafr Bir'im was a Maronite stone-built village in the Upper Galilee, surrounded by gardens, olive groves, and vineyards. Its people were ordered out in November 1948 on a promise of return; instead the village was bombed in 1953, and only its church and bell tower still stand above the ruins.

Depopulated 1948

Sa'sa' stood at 875 metres in the upper Galilee with 1,130 people and 14,796 dunums in 1944/45. A Palmach raid on 15 February 1948 blew up houses in the night under orders to destroy twenty and kill as many fighters as possible; the New York Times reported eleven villagers killed, five of them small children. The village was taken by the Seventh Brigade on 30 October during Operation Hiram, and kibbutz Sasa was founded on the site in 1949.

Depopulated 1948

Safsaf, seven kilometres from Safad, was the first village taken in Operation Hiram and the site of one of its massacres. Israel Galili, formerly head of the Haganah national staff, listed fifty-two men tied with a rope, dropped into a well and shot, ten of them killed, and three cases of rape; villagers told Nafez Nazzal that about seventy men were blindfolded and shot one after another in front of them. Its 910 people held 7,391 dunums in 1944/45.

Depopulated 1948

Hittin stood below the Horns of Hattin, where Salah al-Din defeated the Crusader armies in 1187, eight kilometres from Tiberias. Its 1,190 Muslim inhabitants held 22,764 dunums in 1944/45. The Seventh Brigade took the village on 17 July 1948 during Operation Dekel; those who tried to return were fired on, and most ended in Lebanon. The mosque and the shrine of al-Nabi Shu'ayb still stand.

Depopulated 1948

Lubya, one of the largest villages of the Tiberias district, stood on a rocky hill over the Nazareth road and twice beat back attacks before its people fled the fall of Nazareth in July 1948. Its ruins lie under the JNF's Lavi and South Africa pine forests — a landscape of erasure that refugee historians have made one of the best-documented of any village.

Depopulated 1948

Nasir al-Din was a village of ninety people three kilometres from Tiberias, attacked by two platoons of the Golani Brigade on 11 or 12 April 1948 as a demonstration intended to break the nerve of the city. Accounts of the dead range from eight men, one woman and an unspecified number of children in a British communiqué to ten in Arif al-Arif's account. Tiberias fell six days later; houses of the city now stand on the site.

Depopulated 1948

Samakh was the largest village of the Tiberias subdistrict, 3,460 people on the southern shore of Lake Tiberias with a station on the line to the Hijaz railway and the border crossing to Mandate Syria. The Golani Brigade took it on 28 April 1948, ten days after the fall of Tiberias; Syrian and Iraqi forces briefly retook it in May. Only the ruins of the railway station and a water reservoir remain.

Depopulated 1948

Kafr Saba, a village on the coastal plain southeast of Qalqilya with shrines to two prophets, had pledged peace with its Jewish neighbors in December 1947 — yet the Alexandroni Brigade seized it two days before Israel declared statehood, driving its people toward Qalqilya. Modern Kfar Saba has spread over its lands, but old houses, the two shrines, and the cemetery remain.

Depopulated 1948

Qaqun, crowned by a Crusader-Mamluk fortress northwest of Tulkarm, was stormed by the Alexandroni Brigade in June 1948 in one of the bloodiest battles of the war, fought trench-to-trench against Iraqi defenders. Some villagers held on in their homes into 1949; the fortress and the school still stand above its orchards.

Depopulated 1948

Umm Khalid stood on a sandstone hill less than two kilometres from the sea, on the site of the Crusader Castellum Rogerii Langobardi, with 970 people and 2,894 dunums in 1944/45. Netanya was founded on its land in 1929 and grew around it. An Israeli intelligence report records that the village was evacuated on 20 March 1948 out of a general sense of fear; villagers described a month of blockade beforehand.

Depopulated 1948

The people of Wadi al-Hawarith had farmed some 30,000 dunums of the coastal plain for three and a half centuries as tenants when, in 1929, the Jewish National Fund bought the land at a court auction from absentee heirs. Their resistance to eviction became the central land case of Mandate Palestine; the courts ruled against them in 1932 and the first expulsions followed in June 1933. The remaining villagers, 1,330 in 1944/45, left on 15 March 1948.

Depopulated 1948

Al-Dawayima was one of the largest villages of the Hebron hills, with 3,710 people and more than 60,000 dunums of land in 1944/45. On 29 October 1948, during Operation Yoav, the 89th Battalion of Israel's Eighth Armoured Brigade entered the village and killed civilians in the houses, in the mosque and at the mouth of a cave. The moshav of Amatzya was built on its land in 1955.

Depopulated 1948

Bayt Jibrin, the Roman city of Eleutheropolis, dominated the crossroads of the southern hills until October 1948, when it was captured during Operation Yoav. Its people fled to the Hebron hills and refugee camps such as al-Fawwar and Aida; kibbutz Beit Guvrin rose on its lands.

Depopulated 1948

Zikrin grew grain where the southern coastal plain meets the foothills of the Hebron mountains. The Giv'ati Brigade occupied it in late October 1948 during Operation Yoav; its site, known as Khirbet Dhikrin, is overgrown scrub marked by broken terraces, olive and carob trees, and the rubble of houses.

Depopulated 1948

Al-Mujaydil stood on the Nazareth–Haifa road six kilometres southwest of Nazareth, the third largest village of its subdistrict with 1,900 people and 18,836 dunums in 1944/45, and the second largest olive producer in the district. A Golani Brigade unit took it on 14 or 15 July 1948 during Operation Dekel; the village was emptied and razed, and Migdal ha-Emeq was built on its land in 1952.

Depopulated 1948

Ma'lul lay six kilometres west of Nazareth, a village of 490 Muslims and 200 Christians who had lost title to most of their land through a twenty-year legal battle with the Jewish National Fund before 1948. Israeli forces took it on 15 July 1948 during Operation Dekel and levelled the houses. Its mosque and two churches still stand inside a JNF pine forest.

Depopulated 1948

Saffuriyya was the largest village of the Nazareth district — a place layered over ancient Sepphoris — until it was bombed and occupied in July 1948. Its people scattered to Nazareth and to refugee camps in Lebanon; the moshav of Zippori and an archaeological park now occupy its lands.

Depopulated 1948

Al-Lajjun stood beside Tell al-Mutasallim — ancient Megiddo — at the southwestern edge of Marj Ibn Amir, on the site of the Roman camp of the Sixth Legion. Repopulated in the late nineteenth century by families from Umm al-Fahm, it counted 1,103 people in 1944/45 and was taken by the Golani Brigade at dawn on 30 May 1948. Kibbutz Megiddo was built on its lands from 1949; most of its people returned to Umm al-Fahm.

Depopulated 1948

Zir'in stood on a spur above Marj Ibn Amir, on the site of biblical Jezreel and beside the spring of Ayn Jalut where Baybars turned back the Mongols in 1260. Its 1,420 people held 23,920 dunums in 1944/45. The Fourth Battalion of the Golani Brigade took the village on 28 May 1948; the kibbutz of Yizre'el was founded on its northwestern side the same year.

Depopulated 1948

Kawkab al-Hawa was built inside the walls of the Crusader fortress of Belvoir, three hundred metres above the Jordan valley eleven kilometres north of Baysan. Its 300 people held 9,949 dunums in 1944/45. It was attacked on 16 May 1948, changed hands during the Iraqi advance, and was finally held by the Golani Brigade. The Arab village was erased; the castle was excavated and turned into a tourist site.

Depopulated 1948

Sirin lay seventeen kilometres north of Baysan, a village of 810 Muslims and Christians holding 28,445 dunums in 1944/45, with Byzantine mosaics and a Greek inscription among its houses. Units of the Golani Brigade occupied it on 12 May 1948, the day Baysan fell. No Israeli settlement was built on its land; a cemetery and a single house survive.

Depopulated 1948

Al-Khalasa was built by Muslim Bedouin of the Azazma tribe in the early twentieth century among the ruins of Elusa, the Nabataean and Byzantine city that had been the capital of Palaestina Tertia. It stood twenty-three kilometres from Bir al-Sabi', with an elementary school opened in 1941. Its people were displaced in the war of 1948; the Negev Brigade held the area, and the site is now used for military training.