Al-Kabri

Al-Kabri lay at the eastern end of the western Galilee coastal plain, twelve and a half kilometers northeast of Acre and less than five from the sea. Under the Crusaders it was Le Quiebre, a dependency of Casal Imbert (al-Zeeb), and in 1596 it paid taxes as a village of ten households. The village was famed for its springs — Ayn Mafshuh, Ayn Fawwar, Ayn al-‘Asal, and Ayn Kabri — which made it the principal source of water for the district of Acre: ancient aqueducts carried the water to the city, and Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar and Sulayman Pasha added two more canals in 1800 and 1814. Its people grew olives, citrus, and bananas and raised cattle; the village had a mosque and a boys’ elementary school. The 1945 survey counted 1,530 people, all Muslims, sharing with neighboring Tarshiha more than 47,000 dunums of land.

The village was marked early in the war. On the night of 31 January–1 February 1948 a Palmach raid partly blew up the house of Fares Efendi Sirhan, the leading al-Husayni-affiliated notable, who fled with his family to Lebanon. On 27 March a Haganah supply convoy to besieged Kibbutz Yehiam was ambushed as it passed al-Kabri, and 46 of its members were killed — a loss the Haganah did not forget. Haganah operatives also repeatedly damaged the Kabri aqueduct that fed Acre and, according to later historical accounts, contaminated its waters with typhoid bacteria. The village was occupied on the night of 20–21 May 1948, during the second stage of Operation Ben-Ami, by which time most of its people had fled; some villagers were later killed when discovered among the displaced of other Galilee villages, in retaliation for the convoy ambush.

Walid Khalidi, inspecting the site in 1992, found crumbled walls and stone rubble overgrown with thorns, weeds, and bushes; the village cemetery and the springs remain. A Jewish agricultural community named Kabri was established on adjacent village land, and the ruins of the old village lie within its pasture.

Sources

• Al-Kabri — Palestine Remembered
• Al-Kabri — Zochrot
• Al-Kabri — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)