Al-Qastal

Al-Qastal crowned a high, rounded hill eight kilometers west of Jerusalem, overlooking the Jaffa–Jerusalem road where it begins its climb through the mountains. It took its name from a Crusader castle, Belveer, that once stood on the summit, and it was one of the smallest communities of the district: the 1945 British survey counted ninety residents, all Muslims, tending cereals and orchards on the slopes.

Its position made it decisive. In the spring of 1948 the Army of the Holy War used the height to attack convoys bound for besieged Jewish Jerusalem, and on 3 April, during Operation Nachshon, troops of the Palmach’s Harel Brigade took the village — most of its people had already fled the fighting. Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni, commander of the Jerusalem hills, led the counterattack, and in the foggy night of 7–8 April he was killed near the village. His fighters retook al-Qastal on 8 April and recovered his body, but his death broke the offensive: thousands left their positions to bury him at al-Aqsa, and on the night of 8–9 April the Palmach retook the nearly deserted hill, blew up its houses, and held it to the end of the war.

The hilltop ruins are now Israel’s Castel National Park, where preserved trenches and a monument commemorate the 1948 battles, and part of the town of Mevaseret Zion spreads over the village lands. For Palestinians, al-Qastal remains bound to the memory of al-Husayni, whose death — a day before Deir Yassin, in the same convulsed week — is often counted a turning point in the fall of Arab Jerusalem.

Sources

• Al-Qastal — Palestine Remembered
• Al-Qastal — Zochrot
• Al-Qastal — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)