Al-Tina

Al-Tina — التِينَة, “the fig tree” — stood on flat ground on the southern coastal plain, twenty and a half kilometres south of Ramla at an average elevation of 75 metres. Roads linked it to nearby villages and to the route from Gaza toward the Ramla–Jerusalem road. By the late Mandate the village had one main section and two smaller clusters to the south and west. Most houses were built of adobe brick along narrow alleys. A mosque stood on the northern side; there were shops, wells for domestic water and an elementary school opened in 1946–47. The Khalidi-derived narrative reproduced by PalQuest and Palestine Remembered gives sixty-seven pupils, while Palestine Remembered’s summary table says the school opened in 1946 with sixty-five.

The 1931 census counted 530 people in 131 houses. The April 1945 Government of Palestine figures, as reproduced by Sami Hadawi in 1970, count 750 residents, all Muslim, on 7,001 dunums: 5,843 dunums were Arab-owned, 949 Jewish-owned and 209 public. The land-use table records 141 dunums of citrus and bananas and 5,639 Arab-held dunums planted in cereals; another 949 Jewish-held and 9 public dunums were also under cereals. Some fields were rainfed, while wells irrigated citrus and other produce.

There is a five-person discrepancy in the population record. PalQuest and Hadawi’s reproduction of the April 1945 government figures give 750. Wikidata’s Q4703294 instead records 755 for 1945, citing page 237 of Muhammad Muhammad Hasan Shurrab’s 1987 Arabic gazetteer Muʻjam buldān Filasṭīn. The gazetteer page itself was not reached for this record, so the attribution remains exactly as Wikidata presents it. This page follows the government figure while preserving the later chain rather than silently choosing between them. The Wikidata item otherwise matches this village’s English and Arabic names and its coordinates at approximately 31.7467° N, 34.8197° E.

The precise depopulation date also differs across the reached sources. PalQuest says al-Tina was attacked before the first truce expired on 8–9 July and was among the first villages occupied in Operation An-Far. Palestine Remembered gives 8 July. The Palestine Land Society’s register prints 7 July while also carrying an 8–9 July note. The secure sequence is that the attack and occupation came at the opening of Operation An-Far as the truce ended; the material reached for this record does not establish whether residents fled before troops entered, were expelled afterward or left in stages.

PalQuest records no Israeli settlement on al-Tina’s land. It places Kefar Menachem, founded in 1937, three kilometres southeast on land belonging to Idnibba. The site description published in Khalidi’s 1992 All That Remains, reproduced by PalQuest and Palestine Remembered, described the village itself as completely effaced: bushes and thorns covered a fenced area, an orange grove stood along the northern and western edges, a highway passed to the south and the railway ran about 100 metres east.

A 2016 archaeological excavation conducted below and west of the village hill before construction of a railway-station access road adds a narrower kind of evidence. Its trenches found meagre late Ottoman–British Mandate walling and pottery as well as earlier Byzantine remains. Those subsurface finds document occupation at the site; they do not show that al-Tina’s village buildings survived above ground. The report’s title, Khirbat et-Tineh (Kefar Menahem), locates the excavation relative to the nearby settlement and does not establish ownership of the village land.

Sources

• al-Tina — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)
• al-Tina — Palestine Remembered, reproducing Walid Khalidi’s account and site description published in 1992
• Sami Hadawi’s 1970 reproduction of Village Statistics 1945, p. 68 — Sabil Library, for the April 1945 population and land-ownership figures
• Sami Hadawi’s 1970 reproduction of Village Statistics 1945, p. 117 — Sabil Library, for cultivated land and crop categories
• The Register of Depopulated Localities in Palestine — Palestine Land Society, for the conflicting date entry
• Elie Haddad, “Khirbat et-Tineh (Kefar Menahem): Final Report” — Hadashot Arkheologiyot 132 (2020), for the bounded 2016 excavation record
• Al-Tina (Q4703294) — Wikidata, for the linked identity and the later 755 population figure