Ni'ilya

Ni’ilya was built on flat ground on the coastal plain nineteen kilometers from Gaza, north of an earlier site that the sand dunes had engulfed. When the dunes began to close in again from the south, the villagers checked them by planting fruit trees. Secondary roads ran to the town of al-Majdal, three kilometers to the north-northeast, and a short way east to the coastal highway. In 1596 Ni’ilya was a village in the nahiya of Gaza, in the liwa’ of Gaza, with 440 people, taxed on wheat, barley, sesame and fruit and on goats, beehives and vineyards. In the late nineteenth century it was surrounded by gardens, with olive groves running all the way to al-Majdal, and the sand blowing in from the coast had been stopped with cactus hedges.

The village was trapezoidal in plan with its long side pointing northeast, its houses of adobe or of cement separated by narrow alleys, some of them built among the fruit orchards, and it expanded along the road to al-Majdal. On its southern side stood a mosque decorated with inscriptions and surrounded by fragments of older buildings and by burial places; the villagers, who were Muslims, held that the tombs contained people killed in the fighting against the Crusaders. The children went to school in al-Majdal — their own school building was finished in the winter of 1948 and never opened, because of the war. There were several small shops. The community lived mainly from agriculture, growing rainfed grain and many kinds of fruit, citrus, grapes, figs and apricots among them; the orchards were irrigated from artesian wells. In 1944/45, 1,084 dunums were under citrus and bananas and 2,215 under cereals, with 1,436 dunums irrigated. The census of 1931 counted 863 people in 169 houses; the 1944/45 survey counted 1,310.

Ni’ilya was probably occupied around the time al-Majdal fell, and was among the last villages taken by Israeli forces in the south: on the heels of Operation Yoav, Israeli units took al-Majdal and a number of its satellite villages on 4–5 November 1948. Zochrot dates the occupation to 5 November.

The center of the town of Ashkelon, established in 1948, lies northwest of the village site, and the town has expanded onto village lands. The village has been obliterated and the site is overgrown with wild plants and a few sycamores. One house, probably built out in a fruit orchard, still stands and is lived in by a Palestinian family; it has a flat roof and rectangular windows and door. The land nearby is farmed by Israelis.

Sources

• Ni’ilya — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)
• Ni’ilya — Zochrot