Al-Qubayba

Al-Qubayba stood on a hilltop in the western foothills of the Hebron mountains, 250 metres up and about 24 kilometres from Hebron, with Wadi Ghufr running along the western foot of the hill. A secondary road linked it to the Hebron–Bayt Jibrin–al-Majdal highway that passed to the northwest, and others to the villages around it. It is identified with Deirelcobebe of the Crusader period. In 1596 it was a village of 182 people in the nahiya of Gaza, taxed on wheat, barley, sesame, fruit trees, goats and beehives. In the late nineteenth century it was a large village of adobe brick on rolling hills at the edge of a plain, in barren and stony country.

Its houses were stone and mud along narrow streets radiating from the centre. The people were Muslims. There was a school, a mosque and a number of small shops, and two wells — one northwest and one southwest of the village — gave drinking water. The 1931 census counted 800 people in 141 houses; the 1945 statistics counted 1,060, on 11,912 dunums of which 8,109 were under cereals. Tall al-Duwayr, the mound of the Canaanite city of Lachish, lay immediately to the southwest; the British excavated it from 1932 to 1938. Counting the mound and the village site itself, at least fifteen archaeological sites lay on al-Qubayba’s twelve thousand dunums.

The village was taken in the third stage of Operation Yoav, on 28 October 1948 — the same day as the massacre at al-Dawayima, not far away — probably by units of the Giv’ati or Har’el brigades; the sources do not settle which. No account gives details of what happened to the villagers. Morris describes a panic flight from al-Qubayba around the time of the occupation without giving a cause, and attributes the village’s depopulation to the military assault on it; PalQuest notes that news of al-Dawayima is unlikely to have reached al-Qubayba the same day. The record here is thin, and it is worth saying so rather than filling it.

The settlement of Lakhish was established on village land to the southwest in 1955. The site itself is marked only by cactus and a handful of olive trees, and a neglected olive grove whose stone terraces are still intact has been fenced in.

Sources

• Al-Qubayba — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)
• Al-Qubayba, Hebron — Zochrot, drawn from Walid Khalidi, All That Remains (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992)