Imwas

Few Palestinian villages carried as much history as Imwas. Identified by a long tradition with the Emmaus of the New Testament — the Roman city of Emmaus Nicopolis — it sat twelve kilometers southeast of Ramla in the Latrun salient, its houses built among Byzantine and Crusader stones, a Franciscan shrine, and the remains of ancient churches. Through two millennia it was ruled by Romans, caliphs, Crusaders, Ottomans, and the British; its own people farmed the valley and numbered about 1,450 in the 1945 British survey. From 1949 it lay in the Jordanian-held West Bank.

In June 1967 Israeli forces captured the salient, and Imwas shared the fate of Yalo and Bayt Nuba: its residents — Muslims and Christians alike — were driven out on foot toward Ramallah, and within weeks the village was bulldozed on orders attributed to Yitzhak Rabin. Photographs of the expulsion, columns of families carrying what they could along the road, became some of the best-known images of the 1967 displacement.

The ruins were planted over as Canada Park in the early 1970s; the archaeological site of Emmaus Nicopolis and its monastery stand adjacent, still open to pilgrims. The village’s refugees live largely in the Ramallah area, and their association, together with those of Yalo and Bayt Nuba, has marked the destruction every June since — a Nakba that came nineteen years after the first.

Sources

• Imwas — Palestine Remembered
• Imwas — Zochrot
• Imwas — Wikipedia