Bayt 'Itab

Bayt ‘Itab stood on a high mountain about seventeen and a half kilometres west of Jerusalem, looking down on lower peaks, its lands running southwest as far as Wadi al-Maghara. Several springs around the village supplied drinking and irrigation water, and a secondary road linked it to the Bayt Jibrin–Bethlehem road three kilometres to the south. The site is identified with Enadab in the fourth-century list of Palestinian towns compiled by Eusebius; the Crusaders called it Bethahatap. Edward Robinson visited in 1838, described the stone houses as solidly built, noted that several had two storeys and that the ruins of a Crusader castle stood at the centre, and put the population at six or seven hundred.

In the 1850s Bayt ‘Itab was the home village of the Lahham family, who controlled the twenty-four villages of the sub-district of al-‘Arqub. Armed conflict broke out between the Lahhams and their rivals the Abu Ghawsh family in 1855 and the village was the scene of fierce fighting; afterwards, as regular Ottoman administration reached the area, the influence of both families fell away and Bayt ‘Itab became an ordinary village. In the late nineteenth century it stood on a rocky knoll rising sixty to a hundred feet above the ridge around it, with olive terraces to the north; its population in 1875 was about seven hundred. A large cavern — eighteen feet wide and six feet high — ran beneath the houses. The original circular plan was drawn out into an arc by new building to the southwest, along the road to Sufla.

The people were Muslims. The 1931 census counted 606 people in 187 houses; the 1945 statistics counted 540, on 8,757 dunums of which 1,400 were under cereals and 665 irrigated or orchard, 116 of those in olives. They lived on grain, grapes, olives and other fruit, kept livestock, and also held extensive land on the coastal plain planted in grain. During the Mandate some village land was expropriated to make a large government woodland.

Bayt ‘Itab was one of a string of villages in the Jerusalem corridor taken after the second truce. Benny Morris records that it was occupied on 21 October 1948, during Operation Ha-Har, which ran alongside Operation Yoav on the southern front; Zochrot gives the same date and names Har’el and Etzioni as the units. Israel established Nes Harim on village land north of the site in 1950. The site is covered with rubble from the demolished houses, with the remains of the Crusader fortress standing out on it. There are two cemeteries, east and west of the village; some of the graves are open and human bones are visible. Almond, carob and olive grow on the site and on the approaches below it, cactus along the southern edge. Part of the surrounding farmland is worked by Israeli farmers.

Sources

• Bayt ‘Itab — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)
• Bayt ‘Itab — Zochrot, drawn from Walid Khalidi, All That Remains (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992)