Qatra

Qatra stood on hilly ground underlain by limestone on the central coastal plain fifteen kilometers from Ramla, about a kilometer south of Wadi al-Sarar, joined by a spur to the highway to Ramla and the other towns and by secondary roads to the villages nearby. It has been identified with the Hellenistic town of Kidron, also called Cedron or Gedrus, named at I Maccabees 15:39; in the Roman period Kidron fell under the jurisdiction of Azotus Hippenus, that is Isdud, and in the fourth century it appears to have been a large town. Little is known of the site in the early Islamic period. In 1596 Qatra was a village in the nahiya of Gaza, in the liwa’ of Gaza, with 336 people, taxed on wheat, barley, sesame and fruit and on goats and beehives. Edward Robinson visited in 1852 and called it a village of considerable size; by the late nineteenth century it was built of adobe brick and surrounded by gardens.

Under the Mandate it was also called Qatrat Islam, to distinguish it from Qatrat Yahud, the adjacent Jewish fort. The village was rectangular in plan, its houses of adobe brick or cement, with a mosque and several shops at the center. Its people were predominantly Muslim. A coeducational elementary school was founded in 1923, with 123 boys and eight girls enrolled in the mid-1940s. As new housing went up on what had been farmland the built-up area spread to the southeast. Agriculture was the chief occupation, helped by ample groundwater and rich soil: grain, vegetables and fruit, some rainfed and some irrigated from artesian wells, with orchards and fields surrounding the village on every side. In 1944/45, 391 dunums were under citrus and bananas and 4,320 under cereals, with 215 dunums irrigated or in orchards, thirty of them in olives. The modern village was built over a Roman and Byzantine site that has yielded mosaic floors, building foundations and ceramic fragments. The census of 1931 counted 822 people in 175 houses; the 1944/45 survey counted 1,210.

The earliest report of Haganah military activity at Qatra is from 13 March 1948, when the Palestinian newspaper Filastin reported a shooting at Arab fruit-pickers working in an orchard that left five wounded. A month later the New York Times reported that Haganah squads moved into the police fortress at Qatra on 17 April, after the British evacuated it.

Benny Morris records that units of the Giv’ati Brigade surrounded the village on 6 May and demanded that the villagers hand over all their weapons. Several dozen armed men tried to break out and were stopped by the Haganah. The villagers gave up several rifles, and the Giv’ati troops moved into the village regardless; the soldiers then began looting, and one of them was shot dead by a villager. The Haganah arrested several villagers and, in Morris’s account, within a few days either intimidated the rest into leaving or ordered them out. The official Haganah account agrees that Qatra was occupied about this time but names the Alexandroni Brigade as the occupying force, probably in error. Zochrot dates the occupation to 6 May and names the Giv’ati Brigade.

Gedera was established just south of the village site in 1884 and is now a town, many of its buildings on village land; Qidron was built on village land in 1949. Only the school and a few deserted houses remain. A number of palm trees and cactuses grow on the site, and the surrounding land is farmed by Israelis.

Sources

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