Bayt Tima

Bayt Tima was built on flat ground on the southern coastal plain twenty-one kilometers from Gaza, in country rich with archaeological remains, some of them from the Crusader period. A secondary road ran a short distance west to the coastal highway, giving it access to Gaza and to al-Majdal. In 1596 Bayt Tima was a village in the nahiya of Gaza, in the liwa’ of Gaza, with 693 people, taxed on wheat, barley, fruit, almonds and sesame and on goats and beehives. In the late nineteenth century it was a village of moderate size with two pools and shrines and two small patches of garden nearby.

Under the Mandate it had its own shops and a mosque, and shared an elementary school built in 1946 with the neighboring villages of Kawkaba and Hulayqat. Its mud houses were grouped in blocks separated by streets or open ground, the largest block at the center. Most of the residents were Muslims, and they worked mainly in rainfed agriculture, growing grain, vegetables and fruit — figs, apricots and almonds above all. In 1944/45, 10,444 dunums were allotted to cereals and 197 dunums were irrigated or in orchards. In the cemetery south of the village a badly worn mosaic pavement was found, suggesting a Roman or Byzantine presence, and architectural elements from earlier periods had been reused in the village mosque. The census of 1931 counted 762 people in 157 houses; the 1944/45 survey counted 1,060. Zochrot cites the Palestinian scholar Salman Abu Sitta’s estimate of 1,230 people in the village in 1948.

An attempt to infiltrate Bayt Tima was recorded as early as 9 February 1948 by the Jaffa daily Filastin, and was driven back by half an hour of fire from the village’s defenders. Israeli sources told the Associated Press that they had occupied the village on 1 June, while slashing behind an Egyptian coastal spearhead, but the occupation was evidently short-lived: the Egyptian writer Muhammad Abd al-Mun’im records that at the end of the first truce, in early July, Bayt Tima was held by Palestinian militiamen, that Israeli forces encroached and took the hills overlooking it, and that its defenders were reinforced by a Saudi company fighting on the southern front. It remained in Arab hands throughout the second truce.

Benny Morris records that an aerial and artillery bombardment in mid-October 1948 caused a large number of people to flee. The village was occupied on 18–19 October, in the early stages of Operation Yoav, probably by the Giv’ati Brigade; the New York Times quoted an Israeli army communiqué of 20 October saying that Bayt Tima had fallen along with Kawkaba and Hulayqat. Zochrot dates the occupation to 18 October and names the Giv’ati Brigade, and adds, citing PalestineRemembered.com, that the village was defended by the Egyptian army and that Israeli troops committed a massacre among the villagers. Neither PalQuest nor Khalidi records a massacre at Bayt Tima, and this archive carries the report only as what Zochrot attributes to that source.

There are no Israeli settlements on village lands. Sycamore and carob trees grow around the rubble on the site, and the land is used for agriculture.

Sources

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