A road that no longer exists as it was
Jaffa to Jerusalem
من يافا إلى القدس
The old road from the sea to the holy city: out of Jaffa across the citrus plain to Ramle, up through the Latrun gap, into the defile at Bab al-Wad, and along the ridge to Jerusalem. Almost every place on it was emptied in 1948 or destroyed in 1967. This is the Atlas's depopulated villages put back into the order a traveller met them.
Eleven of the fourteen stops between the two cities were villages. Ten of the eleven were emptied. One was not.
- End to end
- 53.3 km
- Stops
- 16
A straight line between the first and last stop. Not the length of the road, and not how long it takes.
10 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 Jaffa, measured on the coordinates listed under each stop. Not road distance. Not travel time.
0 kilometres from Jaffa in a straight line
Jaffa
يافا
CityStanding
The port the road was built to serve, and the reason it exists: pilgrims, oranges and post all came ashore here. Most of Jaffa's seventy thousand people were driven out in 1948; a Palestinian community endures in Ajami.
Read the record32.0540, 34.7551 · src/data/geo/places.json (Nominatim, cross-checked against Wikidata Q180294)
5.0 kilometres from Jaffa in a straight line
Yazur
يازور
VillageDepopulated 1948
The first village out of Jaffa on the Ramle road, 4,030 people in 1945. Bombed and raided from December 1947, it fell at the end of April 1948 as Operation Hametz closed around Jaffa. Two shrines still stand among the apartment blocks of Azor and Holon.
Read the record32.0289, 34.7994 · Wikidata Q8050647
9.0 kilometres from Jaffa in a straight line
Bayt Dajan
بيت دجن
VillageDepopulated 1948
Biblical Beth Dagon, at the crossroads south of Jaffa: a citrus village of nearly four thousand people with two schools. It fell in the same operation, at the end of April 1948. A moshav took its name and its lands; one surviving house serves as a synagogue.
Read the record32.0035, 34.8293 · Wikidata Q2905719
17.3 kilometres from Jaffa in a straight line
Ramle
الرملة
CityStanding
The halfway city, and the only major city in Palestine founded by Muslim rulers rather than inherited — built early in the eighth century as the capital of Jund Filastin. Assigned to the Arab state under the partition plan, occupied on 12 July 1948, and emptied of its people the following day.
Read the record31.9275, 34.8625 · src/data/geo/places.json (Wikidata Q221447)
28.1 kilometres from Jaffa in a straight line
al-Qubab
القباب
VillageDepopulated 1948
1,980 people in 1945, on the road east of Ramle where the plain begins to lift toward the hills. There is no record for al-Qubab in this archive yet; it is on the Atlas as a dot, and here as a name you would have passed.
No record in this archive yet — listed, not linked.31.8666, 34.9542 · Wikidata Q4703094
32.5 kilometres from Jaffa in a straight line
Imwas
عمواس
VillageDestroyed 1967
Emmaus of the Gospels, Nicopolis of the Romans, and a Palestinian village until June 1967, when Israeli forces expelled its people and bulldozed it along with Yalo and Bayt Nuba — some 8,000 people from the three villages, ordered out by megaphone and kept out. Canada Park was planted over the ruins.
Read the record31.8420, 34.9927 · Wikidata Q11711969
35.3 kilometres from Jaffa in a straight line
Latrun
اللطرون
JunctionStanding
The hill that commands the gap. The road from Ramle to Jerusalem passes beneath it, which is why the fighting of 1948 concentrated here and why the salient stayed a Jordanian-held no man's land between the armistice lines until 1967. Yalo and Bayt Nuba, destroyed with Imwas in June 1967, both stood within a few kilometres of this point.
Where the record is thin: Latrun is the one village-scale record in this archive's geodata whose two independent coordinates disagree by more than two kilometres: Wikidata and its own English Wikipedia article are 3.99 km apart. The Wikidata point is used here and the disagreement is left standing rather than resolved — see src/data/geo/README.md.
No record in this archive yet — listed, not linked.31.8335, 35.0236 · Wikidata Q1670976
36.8 kilometres from Jaffa in a straight line
Bab al-Wad
باب الواد
PassStanding
The Gate of the Valley: the point where the road stops crossing the plain and starts climbing, through a deep valley flanked by steep rock. Whoever held the slopes above it held the road, which is what made the villages on either side of the ascent the object of the fighting in the spring of 1948.
Where the record is thin: The English Wikipedia article gives Bab al-Wad as 23 km from Jerusalem. The coordinates on this page put it 16.5 km from Jerusalem in a straight line — the column measures from Jaffa, so subtract to see it — because Wikipedia's figure is along the road. Both are right about different things; the gap between them is roughly what the mountain costs.
No record in this archive yet — listed, not linked.31.8145, 35.0249 · Wikidata Q1282220
39.1 kilometres from Jaffa in a straight line
Bayt Mahsir
بيت محسير
VillageDepopulated 1948
2,400 people in 1945, on the ridge above the southern side of the ascent, looking down on Bab al-Wad. No record for it in this archive yet.
No record in this archive yet — listed, not linked.31.7944, 35.0347 · Wikidata Q2899514
41.4 kilometres from Jaffa in a straight line
Saris
ساريس
VillageDepopulated 1948
560 people in 1945. Depopulated during Operation Nachshon, the Haganah offensive launched in April 1948 to take the villages between Jerusalem and the coastal plain and break the siege of Jewish Jerusalem. No record for Saris in this archive yet.
No record in this archive yet — listed, not linked.31.7981, 35.0737 · Wikidata Q445159
43.7 kilometres from Jaffa in a straight line
Abu Ghosh
أبو غوش
VillageStanding
Qaryat al-'Inab, ten kilometres west of Jerusalem on the highway — and the one village on this stretch of the road whose people were not driven from it in 1948. It is the exception that makes the rest of the column legible.
No record in this archive yet — listed, not linked.31.8047, 35.1125 · Wikidata Q335023
46.5 kilometres from Jaffa in a straight line
Al-Qastal
القسطل
VillageDepopulated 1948
A village of ninety people on a hill that decided a war. Palmach troops took it on 3 April 1948 during Operation Nachshon; Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni, the commander of the Jerusalem hills, was killed in the counterattack on the night of 7–8 April, and the offensive to keep the road closed did not survive him.
Read the record31.7969, 35.1442 · Wikidata Q1048597
48.2 kilometres from Jaffa in a straight line
Qaluniyya
قالونيا
VillageDepopulated 1948
Directly on the highway a few kilometres west of Jerusalem, and the last village of any size before it. Haganah forces entered on 11 April 1948 — two days after Deir Yassin — and blew up fifty houses. Some of its families ended up in ar-Ram, on the Ramallah road.
Read the record31.7939, 35.1639 · Wikidata Q2898847
49.8 kilometres from Jaffa in a straight line
Deir Yassin
دير ياسين
VillageDepopulated 1948
About a kilometre south of the road rather than on it, and included here because this road is the reason it happened: the massacre of 9 April 1948 fell in the same week as al-Qastal and Qaluniyya, in the fighting over the approach to Jerusalem. More than a hundred villagers were killed by Irgun and Lehi fighters.
Read the record31.7858, 35.1781 · Wikidata Q1770995
50.7 kilometres from Jaffa in a straight line
Lifta
لفتا
VillageDepopulated 1948
The last stop before the city, and the most visible: its stone houses still stand in the valley below the highway, emptied of their roughly three thousand people in the first months of 1948. Families from Lifta are among those named in Qalandiya camp, on the Ramallah road.
Read the record31.7944, 35.1967 · Wikidata Q2599091
53.3 kilometres from Jaffa in a straight line
Jerusalem
القدس
CityStanding
The end of the climb. From here the other road on this page begins, north to Ramallah.
Read the record31.7827, 35.2212 · src/data/geo/places.json (Nominatim, cross-checked against Wikidata Q1218)
Reading the road
The Atlas holds 425 mapped village sites from the 1948 layer as points on a map, which is the right way to see how many there were and the wrong way to understand what a single day was like. This page takes one line across that map and puts the villages back in the order somebody would have met them.
It is the old road from the sea to Jerusalem. Out of Jaffa it runs south-east across the citrus plain to Ramle, then east to the gap at Latrun, where the coastal plain ends and the Judean hills begin. At Bab al-Wad — the Gate of the Valley — the road enters a defile and starts to climb, and from there to Jerusalem it runs along a ridge with villages on the heights either side.
That geography is the whole of the 1948 fighting on this road, in one paragraph. Whoever held the slopes above the ascent controlled the traffic. Operation Nachshon, launched in April 1948 to take the villages between Jerusalem and the coast and break the siege of Jewish Jerusalem, was a campaign against precisely the places listed below. Al-Qastal, Qaluniyya, Saris and Deir Yassin fall inside eight days of each other in that April, and they are consecutive stops here because they were consecutive on the road.
Read the column and one arithmetic will not leave. There are fourteen stops between Jaffa and Jerusalem. Eleven of them were villages with people living in them in 1947. Ten of those eleven were emptied — nine in 1948 and Imwas in 1967 — and one, Abu Ghosh, was not. Ramle, the city at the halfway point, was emptied too, on 13 July 1948. Latrun is a hill and Bab al-Wad is a gap in the rock, and those two are on this page because you pass them, not because anyone lived there.
What the distance column is, and is not
Every figure is the straight-line distance from Jaffa, computed with a haversine on the published latitude and longitude of each stop. The road is longer, and in the hills it is considerably longer: Bab al-Wad sits 16.5 km from Jerusalem as the crow flies and 23 km by road. The column is a way of spacing the stops honestly, not a route to drive.
Three of the stops — al-Qubab, Bayt Mahsir and Saris — have no record in this archive yet, and are listed with no link rather than a link to nothing. Their coordinates and 1945 populations come from the same Wikidata-derived dataset that draws them on the Atlas. Abu Ghosh and Latrun are not depopulated-village records at all and never were; they are on this page because you pass them.
Sources
- Sha’ar HaGai / Bab al-Wad — English Wikipedia
- Abu Ghosh — English Wikipedia
- Saris, Jerusalem — English Wikipedia
- Latrun — English Wikipedia
- Imwas — English Wikipedia
- Lost Routes: How Travel in and around Jerusalem Was Fractured — Jerusalem Story (Institute for Palestine Studies)
- 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, which are the ones to cite.
Every source on this page
- en.wikipedia.orghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sha%27ar_HaGai(opens in a new tab)
- en.wikipedia.orghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghosh(opens in a new tab)
- en.wikipedia.orghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saris,_Jerusalem(opens in a new tab)
- en.wikipedia.orghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latrun(opens in a new tab)
- en.wikipedia.orghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imwas(opens in a new tab)
- jerusalemstory.comhttps://www.jerusalemstory.com/en/photo-album/lost-routes-how-travel-and-around-jerusalem-was-fractured(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
“Jaffa to Jerusalem.” The Roads, FALASTEEN.AI. Accessed 22 August 2026. https://falasteen.ai/roads/jaffa-jerusalem.- MLA
“Jaffa to Jerusalem.” The Roads, FALASTEEN.AI, 2026, https://falasteen.ai/roads/jaffa-jerusalem. Accessed 22 August 2026.- BibTeX
@misc{falasteen-jaffa-jerusalem, title = {Jaffa to Jerusalem}, howpublished = {\url{https://falasteen.ai/roads/jaffa-jerusalem}}, organization = {FALASTEEN.AI — A Living Archive for Palestine}, year = {2026}, note = {Accessed 2026-08-22} }