Ayn Ghazal

Ayn Ghazal — “spring of the gazelle” — lay on the higher western slopes of Mount Carmel, twenty-one kilometers south of Haifa, close to the coastal highway. It was a sizable village of stone houses with a mosque and a school, its people farming grain and olives across some eighteen thousand dunams; the 1945 British survey counted 2,170 residents, all Muslims.

Together with neighboring Jaba and Ijzim, Ayn Ghazal formed what the Israeli command called the “little triangle” — a pocket on the Carmel ridge that resisted after Haifa itself had fallen. The villages beat back an assault in April 1948 and observed the July truce, but on 24–26 July, during Operation Shoter, they were overrun after aerial bombing and street fighting. Most of Ayn Ghazal’s people were expelled across the lines toward Jenin and Tulkarm, where many still live in the region’s refugee camps; some who remained inside the armistice lines were absorbed into nearby villages such as Fureidis and Jisr al-Zarqa, refugees a few kilometers from home.

Moshav Ein Ayala took part of the village lands in 1949, and the JNF’s Ofer forest was planted over more. Ruins survive in the woods — among them the stone steps of the house of the mukhtar, Abd al-Qader Abu Zulaykha — and former residents have returned for decades to post signs and tell the village’s name where the forest signs do not.

Sources

• Ayn Ghazal — Palestine Remembered
• ’Ayn Ghazal — Zochrot
• Ayn Ghazal — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)