Tall al-Safi

Tall al-Safi stood on a hilltop almost a hundred metres above the plain, on the south bank of Wadi ‘Ajjur in the western foothills of the Hebron mountains, about 31 kilometres from Hebron. A secondary road linked it to the highway between al-Majdal and the Jaffa–Jerusalem road, which ran to the northwest. The mound was occupied from the third millennium BC until 1948. A limited excavation for the Palestine Exploration Fund in 1899 turned up Philistine pottery, and the site is probably that of Gath. It appears on the Madaba map as Saphitha. The Crusaders built a fort here that Salah al-Din destroyed and called it Blanche Garde, after the white rock outcrop on the east side of the mound. Yaqut al-Hamawi described it as a fort near Bayt Jibrin; Mujir al-Din al-Hanbali recorded it as falling under the jurisdiction of Gaza. In 1596 it was a village of 484 people in the nahiya of Gaza, taxed on wheat, barley, fruit, sesame, goats and beehives.

In the late nineteenth century the houses were adobe brick, their walls of stone held with mud and mortar, standing along roads that wound through the village in a star. The people were Muslims. There was a marketplace, a mosque, and a shrine for Shaykh Muhammad, a local sage; a well supplied domestic water. The 1931 census counted 925 people in 208 houses; the 1945 statistics counted 1,290, on 28,925 dunums with 19,716 under cereals, 696 irrigated or orchard, and 521 in olives. Rainfed farming came first and livestock second, mostly goats and sheep. Grain, vegetables, grapes, figs and almonds grew on land that was flat in parts and broken in others. The remains of the Crusader castle, walls, burial places, a cave and carved stones lay on the site.

The village was a central target of Operation An-Far, launched between the two truces in July 1948. On 7 July the Giv’ati commander Shim’on Avidan ordered the First Battalion to take the Tall al-Safi area and to expel the refugees encamped there, in order to prevent infiltration from the east into what he called an important position. The position was taken on 9–10 July; Zochrot gives 9 July and the same brigade. An Israeli army report quoted by Benny Morris afterwards judged that the capture of Tall al-Safi had broken the morale of the surrounding villages entirely.

No Israeli settlement was built on the village’s land. The site is overgrown with foxtail and thorn, with cactus, date palm and olive among it, and it holds the remnants of a well and the crumbling stone walls of a pool. The land around it is farmed by Israelis in citrus, sunflowers and grain. A few Bedouin tents are pitched nearby from time to time.

Sources

• Tall al-Safi — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)
• Tall al-Safi — Zochrot, drawn from Walid Khalidi, All That Remains (Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992)