Al-Sawafir al-Sharqiyya

Al-Sawafir al-Sharqiyya stood on the eastern coastal plain, thirty-two kilometres northeast of Gaza and just south of the road linking al-Majdal and Gaza with Ramla and Jerusalem. Al-Sharqiyya — eastern — distinguished it from al-Sawafir al-Gharbiyya and al-Sawafir al-Shamaliyya; together the three villages formed an approximately right-angled triangle. The 1931 census counted 787 people in 148 houses. In 1944/45 the population was 970, all Muslim. Most houses were built from adobe and a few from stone. The village had a mosque and shared a school with the other two Sawafir villages; that school enrolled about 280 pupils by the mid-1940s.

The 1944/45 land statistics covered 13,831 dunums: 13,200 Arab-owned, 103 Jewish-owned and 528 public. Of that land, 11,821 Arab-owned dunums and all 103 Jewish-owned dunums were allotted to cereals; 930 Arab-owned dunums were planted with citrus and bananas; and 386 Arab-owned dunums were irrigable or used for plantations. The statistics also recorded 40 Arab-owned built-up dunums and 551 non-cultivable dunums, comprising 23 Arab-owned and 528 public. Agriculture was predominantly rainfed, with grain, citrus, grapes and apricots among the crops. The fetched pages agree on the 970-person 1944/45 count but not on their separately labelled 1948 figures: Palestine Remembered gives 1,125, while Zochrot gives 1,130.

PalQuest and the narrative reproduced by Palestine Remembered cite two Israeli sources for the Giv’ati Brigade’s occupation of the village during the second stage of Operation Barak. In that account the operation began on 9 May 1948 and the village was occupied on 18 May, after most residents had fled; some residents were probably expelled. Zochrot also gives 18 May and identifies Giv’ati. An Egyptian account by Gamal Abdel Nasser, then a staff officer in Egypt’s Sixth Battalion, differs sharply: it places the occupation about two weeks after the first truce began, around 25 June. PalQuest records that the Sixth Battalion was ordered to retake the village when the truce ended on 9 July, but that the planned advance stalled at Bayt Daras. The archive retains both occupation chronologies rather than treating 18 May as uncontested.

PalQuest notes that later settlements around the three Sawafir villages are difficult to locate precisely because their names changed. PalQuest and Zochrot list four established on al-Sawafir al-Sharqiyya’s land: En Tzurim and Shafir in 1949, Zerachya in 1950 and Nir Banim farther east in 1954. Palestine Remembered’s statistical summary adds Deganim as a separate name, while its narrative says instead that settlers from Deganim apparently joined En Tzurim. The fetched records therefore do not establish Deganim as a separate fifth settlement on the village’s land.

The site description reproduced by PalQuest and Palestine Remembered comes from Walid Khalidi’s All That Remains, published in 1992. It recorded no village houses remaining, new buildings on the former mosque site, a water-pump building in Isma’il al-Sawafiri’s orchard, an old sycamore in the al-Buhaysi family’s orchard and an old cypress in an otherwise vacant field. Zochrot repeats a shorter version of that description. None of the three fetched pages provides a later dated site inspection, so those observations are not presented here as a current survey.

Sources

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