Bayt Darras

Bayt Darras lay on the coastal plain thirty-two kilometers northeast of Gaza, its flat fields rising westward into a low hill where the Crusaders had built a castle and the Mamluks a khan on the mail route between Gaza and Damascus. By 1945 it was a town of 2,750 people, all Muslims, with two mosques, two elementary schools, and more than sixteen thousand dunams planted in grain, citrus, and bananas.

The town was attacked from the first months of the war: a mortar bombardment on 27–28 March 1948 killed nine villagers, according to the commander of the area’s Arab militia, and set fire to crops and livestock. In May the Givati Brigade, opening Operation Barak, bombarded Bayt Darras again and stormed it despite its defense by Sudanese regulars and local militiamen; Benny Morris dates the fall of the town to 10 May, days before the Mandate ended, though Egyptian accounts place the occupation later. Most of its more than three thousand people fled south toward Gaza as their houses were blown up behind them — a flight that survivors, in the account of Bayt Darras native Ramzy Baroud, remember as a massacre. In the fighting after the first truce, Sudanese soldiers briefly retook the ruins, only to be shelled out of them by their own side after a signal error — an episode Gamal Abdel Nasser, then a staff officer, later recounted in his memoirs.

In 1950 the moshavim Giv’ati, Azrikam, and Emunim were established on the town’s lands. Of Bayt Darras itself, visitors in the 1990s found only the foundations of one house, scattered rubble, and a single recognizable street among the cactus and eucalyptus. The town survives instead in Gaza’s refugee camps, where its families have produced the writers Abdallah Tayeh and Ramzy Baroud and the singer Mohammed Assaf — a few miles away, across a closed border.

Sources

• Bayt Daras — Palestine Remembered
• Bayt Daras — Zochrot
• Bayt Daras — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)