Kawkaba

Kawkaba stood on an uneven stretch of red-brown soil on the southern coastal plain, twenty-five kilometers northeast of Gaza city at an average elevation of 100 meters, on a highway the British built during the Second World War that paralleled and fed the coastal road through Gaza and Julis. Crusaders knew the site as Coquebel, and in 1596 Kawkab — a site identified with Kawkaba — was a village of 88 people paying taxes on wheat, barley, sesame, fruit trees, and vineyards. The modern village was built around the middle of the nineteenth century on the site of a khirba of the same name and grew in a rectangular layout north–south along the road, with a well to the west, a pool to the north, houses of adobe and cement, and shops clustered at the village center on the western side of the road; on its eastern lands were a spring and a well 70 meters deep. Its inhabitants were Muslims who practiced rainfed agriculture — grain and winter and summer vegetables, joined toward the end of the Mandate by figs and grapes — and the village shared an elementary school with neighboring Bayt Tima and Hulayqat. The population was 439 in 1922 per Palestine Remembered’s table, and 522 people in 121 houses in 1931; the British government’s April 1945 survey estimated 680. Of the village’s 8,542 dunums, PalQuest and Palestine Remembered both record 8,386 as Arab-owned and 156 as public — Palestine Remembered lists Jewish ownership as zero; in 1944/45, 8,169 dunums were planted with cereals and 166 were irrigated or used for orchards. The village also contained an archaeological site with a pool, cisterns, building foundations, columns, and severed capitals, and Khirbat Kamas, identified with the Crusader Camsa, lay to its north.

The war reached Kawkaba early: PalQuest records that the newspaper Filastin reported a two-hour clash on the road outside the village on 11 January 1948, in which Arab fighters attacked an armed Jewish convoy and lost one man. On the depopulation itself the reached sources carry different dates, and the record does not support choosing among them. PalQuest’s account, citing Benny Morris, has the villagers fleeing westwards to Gaza on 13 May 1948 as a result of the destruction of nearby Burayr during Operation Barak, while the History of the Haganah — cited in the same account — claims the villagers left in October 1948 during Operation Yoav; Palestine Remembered’s summary table lists an occupation date of 12 May 1948 under Operation Yoav, and Zochrot’s catalogue lists 13 May 1948 and attributes the occupation to “Hagana units.” PalQuest further relays an Egyptian account by Muhammad Abd al-Mun’im, relying on Egyptian official records: Israel first occupied Kawkaba on 14 June 1948, in violation of the war’s first truce, and expelled the villagers at that time; the Egyptian Second Infantry Battalion, helped by a Saudi company, retook the village on 8 July as the first truce ended, and it apparently remained in Arab hands until the end of the second truce on 18–19 October. The New York Times reported that on 20 October the Israeli army announced the capture of Kawkaba together with Bayt Tima and Hulayqat. By PalQuest’s reckoning the village changed hands no fewer than three times, and its inhabitants were probably displaced in stages. Palestine Remembered classifies the cause of the exodus as the influence of the fall of, or exodus from, a neighboring town. For the village’s population on the eve of depopulation, Palestine Remembered’s table gives 789 — a figure its population table attributes, like all its population figures, to the British Mandate’s Village Statistics — and Zochrot gives 790 without stating a basis.

The settlement of Kokhav Mikha’el was founded in 1950 on village lands, southeast of the village site, according to PalQuest; Palestine Remembered and Zochrot likewise list it (Zochrot as “Kohav Michael”) as the settlement on Kawkaba’s lands, without a founding year. The field research of the Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi, quoted by Palestine Remembered and carried in PalQuest’s account, described the site as overgrown with sycamore and Christ’s-thorn trees, with the old road, crumbled walls, and debris clearly visible in a wooded part of the site, and the land in the vicinity cultivated by Israeli farmers; Palestine Remembered’s summary characterized the village as completely defaced. The reached sources do not establish their condition in 2026.

Sources

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