Hamama

Hamama stood on flat coastal-plain land twenty-four kilometers north of Gaza, about two kilometers from the sea, between two long sand dunes, with the coastal highway and railway just to its east. Its name — ‘dove’ — matched its antiquity: it was built over Tall Mishqafa, identified with the Byzantine town of Peleia, which means the same. The village grew in a star pattern along the roads to neighboring settlements; it had a mosque, a boys’ school from 1921 and a girls’ school from 1946, and a village council. Its people grew grain, citrus, apricots, almonds, figs, olives, and melons, and planted trees against the encroaching sand. The 1945 survey counted 5,070 people — 5,010 of them Arabs, nearly all Muslims — making Hamama one of the largest villages of the Gaza district in both land and population.

The war reached Hamama early. In January 1948 villagers working the fields between Hamama and Isdud were shot at from nearby Nitzanim, leaving fifteen wounded; days later another villager was killed, and in February people waiting for the bus on the main road were fired on. By the autumn the village was crowded with refugees from earlier offensives. According to Benny Morris, Hamama was occupied in the third stage of Operation Yoav, on 28 October 1948, as Isdud, five kilometers north, fell to Israeli forces and the Egyptian army withdrew down the coast.

Settlements had already taken root on the village’s lands before its fall — Nitzanim, founded in 1943 — and others followed: Nitzanim–Kefar ha-No’ar in 1949, Beit Ezra in 1950, and the Eshkolot farm in the 1950s. Of Hamama itself, nothing stands: no trace of its houses or landmarks survives. The rubble of the demolished village was pushed into heaps at the northern edge of the site, and the rest is wild vegetation — tall grasses, weeds, bushes, and cactuses.

Sources

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