Hiribya

Hiribya stood on the southern coastal plain fourteen kilometers from Gaza, on flat ground covered with sand dunes, with a secondary road running two kilometers east to the coastal highway and so to Gaza and to al-Majdal. The site goes back to the Canaanite period. The Crusaders knew it as Forbie; the Arab geographer Yaqut al-Hamawi, who died in 1228, called it Firbiya and placed it within the jurisdiction of Ascalon — a city that flourished in the early Islamic period until the Mamluk sultan al-Zahir Baybars destroyed it in 1270 to deny the Crusaders a base. In 1244 Hiribya was the site of a battle between Muslim forces and a joint force of Crusaders and Syrian Muslim recruits which historians consider second in strategic significance only to Hittin in 1187. In 1596 Hiribya was a village in the nahiya of Gaza, in the liwa’ of Gaza, with 963 people, taxed on wheat, barley, grapes, fruit and cotton.

In the late nineteenth century the village was rectangular in plan, though some of its adobe brick houses stood scattered in the surrounding orchards, and it had a pond, a well and several gardens; the remains of a Crusader fortress lay to the south. Its people were Muslims. The village later expanded along the road to the coastal highway. Its mosque and its elementary school stood at the center; the school opened in 1922 and enrolled 124 pupils in the mid-1940s. Set among the dunes, Hiribya resembled an oasis: rainfall was enough for agriculture and the groundwater lay close to the surface. The villagers grew citrus, grapes, bananas and sugar cane. In 1944/45, 2,765 dunums were under citrus and bananas and 4,366 under cereals, with 5,706 dunums irrigated or in orchards. Ruins in and around the village — the remains of a tower, architectural fragments, reservoirs to the southwest — showed the antiquity of the site; Khirbat al-Sharf nearby has been identified with Roman Diocletianopolis, also known as Sarafia, from which the Arabic name comes, and a little further east lay the Byzantine site of Khirbat al-Yasmina. The census of 1931 counted 1,520 people in 234 houses, a figure the Mandate statistics group with the neighboring Ashraf; the 1944/45 survey counted 2,240 Arabs, alongside 60 Jews.

The date of the occupation is not certain. Hiribya was definitely targeted during Operation Yoav in October 1948 and came under aerial bombardment on 15 and 16 October along with a number of towns and villages nearby. An attack on the village was planned later in the same operation, but the Israeli History of the War of Independence records that it was called off when it was learned that a large Egyptian force was quartered there. The village probably fell to Israeli forces in early November, shortly after the occupation of al-Majdal a few kilometers to the north, at the close of Operation Yoav; Zochrot dates it to 5 November.

Ziqim and Karmiyya were established on village lands in 1949 and 1950, and Yad Mordekhay, founded in 1943, has expanded onto them. The mosque, converted into a warehouse, and the house of Muhammad Atiyya are the only buildings that survive. The site is overgrown with cactuses, camomile, shrubs and sycamore. The land around is planted with wheat, avocados and other crops.

Sources

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