A road that no longer exists as it was
Haifa to Jaffa
من حيفا إلى يافا
Eighty-eight kilometres down the coast, from the Carmel headland to the Jaffa harbour, along the road and railway that carried Palestine's citrus to the ports. Three of its villages held the road for four months in 1948 and were taken during a truce; the rest were emptied around them.
Every stop on this route between the two cities was a Palestinian village in 1947. None of them has its people today.
- End to end
- 88.0 km
- Stops
- 12
A straight line between the first and last stop. Not the length of the road, and not how long it takes.
11 have a record in this archive. 10 are villages emptied of their people.
The road
km
The stops, in the order you pass them
Straight-line distance from Haifa, measured on the coordinates listed under each stop. Not road distance. Not travel time.
0 kilometres from Haifa in a straight line
Haifa
حيفا
CityStanding
The start: Palestine's great industrial port under the Mandate, a mixed city climbing Mount Carmel, and the terminus of the coast railway. Most of its Palestinian neighbourhoods were emptied by sea in April 1948.
Read the record32.8185, 34.9989 · src/data/geo/places.json (Nominatim, cross-checked against Wikidata Q41621)
6.7 kilometres from Haifa in a straight line
Al-Tira
الطيرة
VillageDepopulated 1948
Seven kilometres south of Haifa on the western slopes of the Carmel, the most populous village of its subdistrict: 5,270 people and 45,262 dunums in 1944/45, and the district's largest olive producer. An Irgun raid on 12 December 1947 killed thirteen villagers; the village fell on 16 July 1948 after a siege of more than two months, under naval bombardment.
Read the record32.7618, 34.9752 · Wikidata Q4118776
18.9 kilometres from Haifa in a straight line
Jaba'
جبع
VillageDepopulated 1948
18.5 km south of Haifa and about three kilometres inland from the sea — the northernmost of the three villages whose fighters closed this road to Jewish traffic for months in 1948. It asked to negotiate a surrender and received no answer. Taken on 24 July 1948 in Operation Shoter.
Read the record32.6513, 34.9620 · Wikidata Q4118648
19.4 kilometres from Haifa in a straight line
Ijzim
إجزم
VillageDepopulated 1948
The second of the three, and the richest village of the Carmel coast: seat of the al-Madi family, 2,970 people in 1945, 45,905 dunums of olives and grain. Two assaults failed. The third came during the second truce, on 24 July 1948, and an Israeli intelligence officer reported that on entering the village his forces 'collected 200 corpses, many of them civilians killed by our bombardment.'
Read the record32.6447, 34.9881 · Wikidata Q2918334
21.0 kilometres from Haifa in a straight line
Kafr Lam
كفر لام
VillageDepopulated 1948
On the shore, a small grain-farming village crowded inside the walls of an early Islamic ribat the Crusaders called Cafarlet. Cleared of its people by July 1948. The fortress and several houses still stand inside the moshav of HaBonim, which is why it survives at all.
Where the record is thin: The English Wikipedia article places Kafr Lam 26 km south of Haifa; the Wikidata coordinate used in this column puts it 21 km away in a straight line. We have not established which measure the published figure uses, and assert neither.
Read the record32.6374, 34.9344 · Wikidata Q6346183
21.0 kilometres from Haifa in a straight line
Ayn Ghazal
عين غزال
VillageDepopulated 1948
The third of the villages that held the road — 2,170 people in 1945, on the wooded Carmel slopes. Its people were expelled toward Jenin and Tulkarm in late July 1948, and its lands became moshav farmland and JNF forest.
Where the record is thin: Kafr Lam and Ayn Ghazal print the same figure because they are almost exactly equidistant from Haifa — 21.02 km and 20.96 km — one on the shore and one on the slope above it. The stops are ordered north to south, not by the column.
Read the record32.6319, 34.9674 · Wikidata Q2918965
24.5 kilometres from Haifa in a straight line
Tantura
الطنطورة
VillageDepopulated 1948
A fishing and farming village on the shore, taken in May 1948, when scores of its residents were killed. The site now lies beneath the beaches of Dor.
Where the record is thin: The scale of the killing at Tantura is contested. The archive's record sets out Teddy Katz's disputed thesis and Alon Schwarz's 2022 documentary rather than settling on a figure, and this page does not settle on one either.
Read the record32.6094, 34.9177 · Wikidata Q2100836
35.2 kilometres from Haifa in a straight line
Barrat Qisarya
برة قيسارية
VillageDepopulated 1948
1,120 people in 1945, on the coast below Tantura, in the stretch where the road passes the Roman harbour of Qisarya. No record in this archive yet.
Where the record is thin: The 1945 population figure carries no reference on its Wikidata statement, so it is weaker than the others in this column. 'Barrat Qisarya' is likewise the name the Wikidata-derived dataset carries. The literature distinguishes the outlying land of that name from the town of Qisarya itself, and this archive has not done the work to say which of them this record is. Treat the name as the dataset's, not as a determination.
No record in this archive yet — listed, not linked.32.5093, 34.9166 · Wikidata Q4863254
48.5 kilometres from Haifa in a straight line
Wadi al-Hawarith
وادي الحوارث
VillageDepopulated 1948
The great land case of Mandate Palestine, on the coastal plain the road crosses. Its people had farmed some 30,000 dunums as tenants for three and a half centuries when, in 1929, the Jewish National Fund bought the land at a court auction from absentee heirs. The courts ruled against them in 1932 and the first expulsions followed in June 1933 — fifteen years before the Nakba, on this road.
Read the record32.3900, 34.9000 · Wikidata Q13358574
55.9 kilometres from Haifa in a straight line
Umm Khalid
أم خالد
VillageDepopulated 1948
On a sandstone hill less than two kilometres from the sea: 970 people and 2,894 dunums in 1944/45, on the site of the Crusader Castellum Rogerii Langobardi. Netanya was founded on its land in 1929 and grew around it. The village was evacuated on 20 March 1948.
Read the record32.3289, 34.8653 · Wikidata Q2911505
81.1 kilometres from Haifa in a straight line
Al-Shaykh Muwannis
الشيخ مونّس
VillageDepopulated 1948
The last village before Jaffa: a citrus village of 1,930 people holding 15,972 dunums on the rise north of the Awja river, whose leaders had reached a truce understanding with the Haganah. In March 1948 the Irgun kidnapped five of its notables and the village emptied on the 30th. Tel Aviv University stands on its land.
Read the record32.1083, 34.8031 · Wikidata Q291432
88.0 kilometres from Haifa in a straight line
Jaffa
يافا
CityStanding
The end of the coast road, and the start of the other historic route on this page — inland to Ramle and up to Jerusalem.
Read the record32.0540, 34.7551 · src/data/geo/places.json (Nominatim, cross-checked against Wikidata Q180294)
Reading the road
This is the coast road, and it is on this page because the road is why the villages on it were fought over.
Between Haifa and Jaffa the Mandate’s main north–south artery and its railway ran within a few kilometres of the shore, carrying the citrus of the coastal plain to two ports. Three villages on the Carmel slopes above it — Jaba’, Ijzim and Ayn Ghazal, the cluster the literature calls the little triangle — sat where they could close it, and did, for months in 1948. They were taken on 24 July 1948, in Operation Shoter, days into the second truce; because a truce was formally in force the operation was described as a police action.
The rest of the stops were emptied around them, on their own timetables: al-Tira under naval bombardment in July, Tantura in May, Umm Khalid in March, al-Shaykh Muwannis on 30 March after five of its notables were taken. Wadi al-Hawarith is the outlier and the one that changes the shape of the page — its people were being evicted through the courts from 1933, fifteen years before the war.
What the distance column is, and is not
Every figure is the straight-line distance from Haifa, computed with a haversine on the published latitude and longitude of each stop. The coast road runs close to north–south, so on this route the figures track the road better than they do in the Jerusalem hills — but they are still not road distances, and where a published figure disagrees the disagreement is printed on the stop rather than hidden.
Three of these villages sat inland of the shore rather than on it: Jaba’ about three kilometres from the sea, with Ijzim and Ayn Ghazal above it on the Carmel. They appear in the column between the coastal stops because that is the order you pass them going south, not because the road ran through them. It ran below them, which is the whole point.
Sources
- Al-Tira, Haifa — English Wikipedia
- Jaba’, Haifa — English Wikipedia
- Kafr Lam — English Wikipedia
- Coordinates and 1945 population figures:
src/data/geo/villages-1948.json, derived from Wikidata and documented insrc/data/geo/README.md - The village records linked from each stop carry their own sources — Palestine Remembered, PalQuest and others — and those are the ones to cite.
Every source on this page
- en.wikipedia.orghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Tira,_Haifa(opens in a new tab)
- en.wikipedia.orghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaba%27,_Haifa(opens in a new tab)
- en.wikipedia.orghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kafr_Lam(opens in a new tab)
Each stop that links to a record in this archive carries its own sources on that page, and those are the ones to cite for the village itself. The sources above are what this page's own claims rest on.
Cite this page
Every claim above carries its sources — citation is the point.
- Chicago
“Haifa to Jaffa.” The Roads, FALASTEEN.AI. Accessed 22 August 2026. https://falasteen.ai/roads/haifa-jaffa.- MLA
“Haifa to Jaffa.” The Roads, FALASTEEN.AI, 2026, https://falasteen.ai/roads/haifa-jaffa. Accessed 22 August 2026.- BibTeX
@misc{falasteen-haifa-jaffa, title = {Haifa to Jaffa}, howpublished = {\url{https://falasteen.ai/roads/haifa-jaffa}}, organization = {FALASTEEN.AI — A Living Archive for Palestine}, year = {2026}, note = {Accessed 2026-08-22} }