Gaza district · depopulated 1950 · 1 min read
Al-Majdal
المجدل
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.
Al-Majdal — Majdal Asqalan, after the nearby ancient city of Ascalon — was one of the largest towns of the southern coastal plain, about eighteen kilometers north of Gaza. Its weavers produced the striped cotton fabric known across Palestine as majdalawi, its market served dozens of villages, and its great mosque anchored the town center. The 1945 British survey counted close to ten thousand residents.
In the autumn of 1948 the town filled with refugees fleeing the fighting elsewhere in the south. Israeli forces captured it on 4 November during Operation Yoav, and most of its people — locals and refugees together — fled to Gaza. A few thousand who remained were confined to a fenced, guarded quarter under military rule; over the following year and a half they were expelled in stages, the last groups trucked to the Gaza border by mid-1950. The expulsion, carried out well after the war’s end, drew protests at the United Nations and remains one of the clearest documented cases of transfer completed in peacetime.
The empty town was repopulated as Migdal and absorbed into the new Israeli city of Ashkelon; its mosque was converted to secular use, and later settlements rose on its outskirts. In Gaza’s camps, al-Majdal’s refugees rebuilt their looms and their quarter names — and Majdalawi weaving, like the memory of the town, is still passed down there.
Sources
Cited works
4- palestineremembered.com — index(opens in a new tab)https://www.palestineremembered.com/Gaza/al-Majdal/index.html
- zochrot.org — en(opens in a new tab)https://www.zochrot.org/villages/village_details/49283/en
- palquest.org — al majdal(opens in a new tab)https://www.palquest.org/en/place/16836/al-majdal
- en.wikipedia.org — Al Majdal, Asqalan(opens in a new tab)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Majdal,_Asqalan
Connected in the archive
35 connected records35 records elsewhere in the archive are linked to this one, each by a piece of evidence you can read below.
names this place — 1 record
One record names the other. A pointer for reading, not a claim that they belong to each other.
- Gaza, by Name
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: The weaving town of ten thousand that was captured in November 1948, held under military rule for two years, and then expelled — in 1950 — into Gaza.
in the same district — 34 records
Filed near each other — the same Mandate district, or the same uncommon subject tags.
- 'Iraq al-Manshiyyaعِراق المَنْشِيَّة
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: Both recorded in the Gaza district.
- Al-Falujaالفالوجة
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: Both recorded in the Gaza district.
- Al-Jiyyaالجِيَّة
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: Both recorded in the Gaza district.
- Al-Juraالجُورَة
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: Both recorded in the Gaza district.
- Al-Masmiyya al-Kabiraالمَسْمِيَّة الكَبِيرَة
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: Both recorded in the Gaza district.
- Al-Masmiyya al-Saghiraالمسمية الصغيرة
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: Both recorded in the Gaza district.
- and 28 more
Cite this page
Every claim above carries its sources — citation is the point.
- Chicago
“Al-Majdal.” Village Memory, FALASTEEN.AI. Accessed 22 August 2026. https://falasteen.ai/memory/al-majdal.- MLA
“Al-Majdal.” Village Memory, FALASTEEN.AI, 2026, https://falasteen.ai/memory/al-majdal. Accessed 22 August 2026.- BibTeX
@misc{falasteen-al-majdal, title = {Al-Majdal}, howpublished = {\url{https://falasteen.ai/memory/al-majdal}}, organization = {FALASTEEN.AI — A Living Archive for Palestine}, year = {2026}, note = {Accessed 2026-08-22} }