Qastina

Qastina occupied a slight rise on the coastal plain some thirty-eight kilometers northeast of Gaza, on the highway between al-Majdal and the Jerusalem–Jaffa road; the British military camp of Beer Tuvia stood three kilometers to the southwest. Recorded in the Ottoman register of 1596 with 385 people, it was a village of adobe-brick houses, a mosque, and gardens watered by wells. Its elementary school, founded in 1936 and shared with neighboring Tall al-Turmus, had 161 pupils by the mid-1940s. The Muslim villagers grew grain and citrus — over 7,300 dunums of cereals in 1944/45 — raised animals and poultry, and found work in the British camp. The 1945 survey counted 890 people.

The village was taken almost as soon as the first truce of the war expired. Around 9 July 1948 the Giv’ati Brigade advanced south into Egyptian-held territory and occupied Qastina, one of at least sixteen villages seized in the ten days between the truces, whose inhabitants were all displaced. The brigade’s operational orders had called for civilians to be expelled, though by an Israeli army account the people of the area fled almost as soon as the operation began; like their neighbors in al-Masmiyya, Qastina’s people were probably driven south toward Gaza rather than east to the Hebron hills.

Jewish settlement on the village’s land had begun before its fall: Kefar Warburg was established there in 1939. After 1948 came Arugot and Kefar Achim (1949), Avigdor (1950), and the development town of Qiryat Mal’akhi — Kiryat Malakhi — in 1951. Of the village itself only debris remains: house rubble strewn across a site overgrown with bushes, tall grass, and mallow, crossed by a dirt road and shaded by eucalyptus trees.

Sources

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