Al-Majdal

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

• Al-Majdal — Palestine Remembered
• Al-Majdal (Gaza) — Zochrot
• Al-Majdal — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)
• Al-Majdal, Asqalan — Wikipedia