Karatiyya

Karatiyya stood on flat ground in the coastal region twenty-nine kilometers from Gaza, with Wadi al-Mufrid, descending from al-Faluja to the east, cutting across its southern and western edges. In the twelfth century the Crusaders built a castle here called Galatie, which Salah al-Din later took. The Arab geographer Yaqut al-Hamawi, who died in 1228, named it Qaratiyya, near Bayt Jibrin, within the jurisdiction of Jerusalem. In 1299 the Mamluk sultan al-Nasir Qalawun camped there on his way to fight the Mongols. In 1596 Karatiyya was a village in the nahiya of Gaza, in the liwa’ of Gaza, with 253 people, taxed on wheat, barley and fruit and on goats, beehives and vineyards. In the late nineteenth century it stood on an open plain, with a ruined tower on a mound just outside it.

The modern population was Muslim and the houses were of adobe brick, the newer building spreading along the al-Faluja–al-Majdal highway that passed north of the village. Karatiyya depended largely on al-Faluja for medical, commercial and administrative services. It had a mosque and an elementary school, founded in 1922, with 128 pupils in the mid-1940s, and two wells dug within the village for domestic water. Rainfed agriculture was the economic mainstay, the most important crops grain and the fruit of the prickly pear; in 1944/45, 12,928 dunums were allotted to cereals and 321 dunums were irrigated or in orchards, and a small area had been planted with fruit trees on the eve of 1948. The village had a grain mill, and a number of khirbas from the Mamluk and Crusader periods lay on its land. The census of 1931 counted 932 people in 229 houses; the 1944/45 survey counted 1,370.

The Giv’ati Brigade launched two operations on the southern front around the village during the Ten Days between the two truces. In the second, the brigade tried to link its zone of control with that of Zionist forces in the Negev; it failed in that but took more territory in the Gaza subdistrict, dispersing the inhabitants of several Palestinian villages. Karatiyya was one of them, captured on the night of 17–18 July 1948, just before the second truce took effect, according to the Israeli History of the War of Independence. The units involved came from the Third Battalion of the Giv’ati Brigade and the Ninth Commando Battalion of the Armored Brigade, the latter storming the village and occupying it. A fierce battle with Egyptian forces followed, reaching the village outskirts; the Haganah account records that when two Egyptian tanks were close to breaking through from the south, an Israeli anti-tank unit hidden behind a wall of prickly pears scored a direct hit on one of them and stopped the advance. The second truce took effect at seven that evening. Zochrot dates the occupation to 18 July.

The New York Times correspondent wrote that the capture of Karatiyya further bottled up the Egyptians, who were in a vulnerable position at the ceasefire. The Israeli success did not open the link to the Negev, because Egyptian forces held other positions just outside the village blocking the road south. Units of the Oded Brigade sent to the southern front and based at Karatiyya failed to take those positions in the second half of October. They became known as the Faluja pocket, which Israel later took under the armistice agreement.

Three settlements stand on village lands: Qomemiyyut, founded in 1950; Rewacha, established close to the site in 1953; and Nehora, established in 1956 partly on village land and partly on land belonging to al-Faluja. Piles of debris are scattered over the site, and a destroyed cemetery, partly hidden among eucalyptus trees, can still be seen. An agricultural road runs through it, and Israeli farmers grow grain and alfalfa on the site and the land around.

Sources

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