Jaffa district · depopulated 1948 · 2 min read
Al-Khayriyya
الخيرية
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.
See Al-Khayriyya on the Atlas32.0371°N · 34.8280°E
Al-Khayriyya stood on flat ground on the central coastal plain, with roads giving it easy access to Jaffa, Lydda, Ramla, and Tel Aviv. Its antiquity reaches back to Sennacherib: the Assyrian king’s record of conquered towns includes Banai Berka, on this site, which the Romans called Beneberak; the Crusaders built a castle here they named Bombrac, and through the Ottoman centuries the village was known as Ibn Baraq. In 1596 it was a village in the nahiya of Ramla with 154 people, taxed on wheat, barley, fruits, sesame, goats, beehives, and vineyards. During the Mandate its residents renamed it al-Khayriyya — ‘the good, the giving’ — to distinguish it from the Jewish colony of Bene Beraq founded six kilometers north in 1924. Its people were predominantly Muslim, with twenty Christians among them; it had two schools, a boys’ school from 1920 with eight dunums of land for agricultural training and a girls’ school from 1945, enrolling 183 boys and 69 girls by 1946. Numerous artesian wells watered its orchards: 3,359 dunums of citrus and bananas in 1944/45. The 1945 survey counted 1,420 people.
The village braced early for the coming war. On 15 December 1947, Filastin reported its people digging defensive trenches and manning outposts at the entrances, in response to the attacks on neighboring Salama and al-Abbasiyya; on 12 February 1948 Zionist forces moved into a village orchard by night and blew up a house. The end came in Operation Hametz, the offensive designed, in the words of its planners, to ‘cleanse the area’ east of Jaffa and encircle the city: on 29 April 1948 the Haganah’s Alexandroni Brigade seized al-Khayriyya along with the cluster of villages around it.
The settlement of Kefar Azar had been established on traditional village land in 1932; Ramat Pinqas (1952) and Ramat Ef’al (1969) followed north of the site, and the site now lies within the suburbs of Giv’atayim. A handful of houses and one of the schools remain: a deserted house with a flat roof among the shrubs, and a two-storey house identified as having belonged to Ahmad al-Tibi, used as a store. Cypress, fig, and orange trees grow between the buildings; part of the village lands later became the great Hiriya landfill, since turned into a park.
Sources
Cited works
3- palestineremembered.com — index(opens in a new tab)https://www.palestineremembered.com/Jaffa/al-Khayriyya/index.html
- zochrot.org — en(opens in a new tab)https://www.zochrot.org/villages/village_details/49173/en
- palquest.org — al khayriyya(opens in a new tab)https://www.palquest.org/en/place/16828/al-khayriyya
Connected in the archive
14 connected records14 records elsewhere in the archive are linked to this one, each by a piece of evidence you can read below.
named in this record — 2 records
One record names the other. A pointer for reading, not a claim that they belong to each other.
- Jaffaيافا
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Al-Khayriyya stood on flat ground on the central coastal plain, with roads giving it easy access to Jaffa, Lydda, Ramla, and Tel Aviv.
- Ramleالرملة
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: In 1596 it was a village in the nahiya of Ramla with 154 people, taxed on wheat, barley, fruits, sesame, goats, beehives, and vineyards.
in the same district — 12 records
Filed near each other — the same Mandate district, or the same uncommon subject tags.
- Abu Kishkأبو كِشْك
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: Both recorded in the Jaffa district.
- Al-'Abbasiyyaالعَبّاسِيَّة
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: Both recorded in the Jaffa district.
- al-Jammasin al-Gharbiالجَمّاسِين الغربي
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: Both recorded in the Jaffa district.
- al-Jammasin al-Sharqiالجَمّاسِين الشرقي
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: Both recorded in the Jaffa district.
- Al-Manshiyyaالمنشية
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: Both recorded in the Jaffa district.
- Al-Mas'udiyyaالمَسْعُودِيَّة
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: Both recorded in the Jaffa district.
- and 6 more
Cite this page
Every claim above carries its sources — citation is the point.
- Chicago
“Al-Khayriyya.” Village Memory, FALASTEEN.AI. Accessed 22 August 2026. https://falasteen.ai/memory/al-khayriyya.- MLA
“Al-Khayriyya.” Village Memory, FALASTEEN.AI, 2026, https://falasteen.ai/memory/al-khayriyya. Accessed 22 August 2026.- BibTeX
@misc{falasteen-al-khayriyya, title = {Al-Khayriyya}, howpublished = {\url{https://falasteen.ai/memory/al-khayriyya}}, organization = {FALASTEEN.AI — A Living Archive for Palestine}, year = {2026}, note = {Accessed 2026-08-22} }