Bayt Nattif

Bayt Nattif stood on a mountain top in the western zone of the Hebron mountains, 425 metres up and about 21 kilometres from Hebron, looking west over the coastal plain and east into the range. It lay a kilometre north of the Bayt Jibrin–Bethlehem highway, with secondary roads to the villages around it. The modern name renders the Roman Beyt Letepha. In 1596 it was a village of 572 people in the nahiya of Jerusalem, taxed on wheat, barley, olives, fruit, goats and beehives. In the late nineteenth century it stood high on a flat-topped ridge between two broad valleys, ringed by olive groves with corn in the valleys below.

Its plan was a star of separate quarters joined by wide streets, with shops spread through all of them. The people were Muslims; there was a mosque and a number of shrines, the most prominent of them dedicated to Shaykh Ibrahim, and an elementary school. Drinking water came from three wells on the village edges. The 1931 census counted 1,649 people in 329 houses, a figure that also takes in Khirbat Umm al-Rus; the 1945 statistics counted 2,150, holding 44,587 dunums with 20,149 under cereals and 688 irrigated or orchard. They lived on rainfed grain, vegetables, grapes and olives, and on livestock. The village sat on an archaeological site of caves, cisterns, mosaic floors, columns and the remains of a Roman road; in 1934 Dimitri Baramki of the Mandate Department of Antiquities excavated two cisterns here, which yielded pottery of the first to third centuries.

Bayt Nattif was taken during Operation Ha-Har by the Fourth Battalion of the Har’el Brigade, and the Israeli accounts of how differ. A Palmach report says the inhabitants “fled for their lives” as the force advanced, and dates the attack to 21 October 1948; the Haganah version says the village was occupied after light resistance, on 22 October. The History of the War of Independence records that the villagers’ bundles were found in the village, which its author read as meaning they had wanted to leave earlier and had not had time to carry their belongings. The capture closed the Bethlehem–‘Ajjur–Bayt Jibrin road, which had been the supply artery for Egyptian troops in the sector. Israeli raids continued in the area between the capture and the armistice of April 1949; Morris records that their purpose was to drive out refugees from nearby villages who had encamped south of Bayt Nattif.

The History of the Haganah calls Bayt Nattif the village of the murderers of the thirty-five, a reference to a Palmach column wiped out in January 1948 on its way to the Kfar Etzion settlements. New York Times reports from the time indicate that the column took a wrong turn and was ambushed at Surif; the Arab account was that the Zionist force attacked Surif deliberately and held it for over an hour before being driven out. After the clash, Haganah forces encircled Bayt Nattif, Dayr Aban and Zakariyya in a punitive attack lasting more than twenty-four hours. No casualty figures were filed. Four settlements were built on village land: Netiv haLamed-He in 1949, and Avi’ezer, Roglit and Newe Mikha’el in 1958. Today bulldozed rubble is spread across a wide area, six steel beams stand in the debris at the centre, and the arches of house entrances can be picked out of it. Two large graves lie open on the northeast side with the bones visible. Cactus, carob and olive grow thinly east of the site.

Sources

• Bayt Nattif — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)
• Bayt Nattif — Zochrot
• Bayt Nattif — English Wikipedia, for the 1931 and 1945 census figures