Al-Sawafir al-Gharbiyya

Al-Sawafir al-Gharbiyya stood on the coastal plain thirty kilometers from Gaza, north of the highway running northeast from al-Majdal to its crossing with the Jerusalem–Jaffa road, with the railway to Gaza passing just north of the village. The qualifier al-Gharbiyya, the western, was added to distinguish it from the two other neighboring villages of the same first name; together the three formed a right triangle with a northeast–southwest hypotenuse. In 1596 it was a village in the nahiya of Gaza, in the liwa’ of Gaza, with 237 people, taxed on wheat, barley and fruits and on goats, beehives and vineyards.

In the late nineteenth century the village had several small gardens and wells. Most of its houses were of mud and adobe brick, a few of stone. Its population was Muslim; it had a mosque, a shrine of a Shaykh al-Baz, and a police station, and shared a school with the other two Sawafir villages which enrolled about 280 pupils in the mid-1940s. Agriculture, mainly rainfed, was the backbone of the economy — grain, citrus, grapes and apricots. In 1944/45, 6,663 dunums were allotted to cereals and 585 dunums were irrigated or in orchards. Fragmentary remains of earlier occupation survived in the village; the maqam of Shaykh al-Baz, for one, contained reused columns. The census of 1931 counted 723 people in 134 houses; the 1944/45 survey counted 1,030.

Two Israeli sources have the village falling in the early stages of Operation Barak. Its inhabitants were driven out either after the extensive attack on nearby Bayt Daras on 10 May 1948 or during the direct military attack on its sister village al-Sawafir al-Sharqiyya on 18 May; the village itself may also have been attacked that day, and Zochrot gives 18 May.

One Egyptian account puts the occupation more than a month later, two weeks into the first truce. Gamal Abdel Nasser, then a junior officer in the area, criticized the Egyptian military command for allowing this village and two others to be occupied, writing that on the day the truce was announced they were empty of Israeli troops, and remarking with irony that the Egyptian High Command had preferred to hand the enemy the chance to occupy them so that Egyptian troops could retake them by assault. When hostilities resumed on 9 July, Nasser’s battalion was ordered to recapture the village. That depended on taking Bayt Daras, which a Sudanese unit entered briefly and then gave up through a careless error. In the meantime Nasser carried out a reconnaissance of the site, going behind the lines to draw up a plan of attack, and recalled that the Israeli force in the Sawafir villages was small. The Israeli History of the War of Independence confirms that the Egyptians planned to take the village in early July and were prevented when the Sudanese force was pushed out of Bayt Daras.

Two settlements were established on village land, Merkaz Shappira in 1948 and Massu’ot Yitzchaq in 1949; En Tzurim was built nearby in 1949 on land belonging to al-Sawafir al-Sharqiyya. Identifying the settlements is complicated by the many changes of name since they were founded, and Deganim appears to have been moved from its original site on the lands of al-Sawafir al-Gharbiyya to join En Tzurim. All of the houses are gone. Some cactuses and fig and sycamore trees grow on the site, an old village road is clearly visible, and the cemetery is overgrown with wild vegetation. The debris of what appears to have been a water-pump building can be seen in the al-Baz orchard. The land alongside is farmed by Israelis.

Sources

• al-Sawafir al-Gharbiyya — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)
• al-Sawafir al-Gharbiyya — Zochrot