Al-Khalasa

Al-Khalasa stood among bare mounds at the confluence of Wadi al-Awsaja and Wadi al-Khalasa, twenty-three kilometres from Bir al-Sabi’, looking out over open country on every side but the south. The site was identified in 1838 by the American scholar Edward Robinson with the Nabataean town of Elusa, which appears to have been a station on the caravan route from Petra to Gaza. Saint Jerome, writing a life of Hilarion in the early fifth century, records that when Hilarion visited Elusa in the fourth he was served wine from the local vineyards; the town appears on the sixth-century Madaba mosaic map, and it seems to have served as a capital in the administrative region of Palaestina Tertia until the Islamic conquest. The geographer Muhammad al-Dimashqi, who died in 1327, listed it within the jurisdiction of Gaza, and al-Maqrizi, who died in 1441, described it as one of the larger cities of southern Palestine. As traffic on the Negev trade routes declined, so did al-Khalasa.

Interest returned in the early twentieth century: the École Biblique of Jerusalem studied the archaeological remains in 1905 and the British Survey drew a plan of the whole site in 1914. At about the same time Muslim Bedouin of the Azazma tribe decided to settle there. They built a triangular village between the banks of the two wadis, its houses of stone and mud, with an elementary school opened in 1941 and a number of shops; the villagers drew their drinking water from a well and lived by animal husbandry and trade. The Mandate’s Village Statistics did not enumerate the Bedouin population of the Beersheba subdistrict village by village, and no separate land figure for al-Khalasa was published.

The village probably came under Israeli control early in the war. Nachum Sarig, commander of the Negev Brigade, is quoted in the History of the Haganah as saying after the war that by 15 May the entire Negev was under complete Hebrew control; Zochrot records an occupation date of 17 December 1947 and names the Negev Brigade. But al-Khalasa may equally, like Bir al-Sabi’ itself, have held out until Operation Yoav in October 1948, when the village was defended by Egyptian troops and local volunteers before the Negev Brigade took it in the last days of the month. The record does not settle the point.

No Israeli settlement was built on the village lands; the area is used for military training. Some of the houses still stand, deserted and half ruined. A well with a round mouth and a metal ladder remains in working order west of the site, and a few metres from it a large rectangular house of eight rooms, with the rubble of ten demolished houses behind. Remnants of the cemetery are visible at the northern end, next to an archaeological dig and a stretch of bulldozed village houses; about fifteen half-destroyed houses stand on the southern and western sides. Excavations in 1938 and again between 1973 and 1980 uncovered an enlarged Nabataean theatre, the largest church in the Negev, other ecclesiastical buildings, defensive towers built into the city wall, and houses.

Sources

• Al-Khalasa — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (palquest)
• Al-Khalasa — Zochrot
• Al-Khalasa — Wikipedia