Jaffa & the Coast

Adalah — The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel

Adalah

Founded in 1996 and based in Haifa, Adalah litigates and advocates for the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel, and for Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, before Israeli courts and international bodies.

October 7 — the documented friendly-fire and Hannibal Directive record

FALASTEEN.AI documentation desk

A sourced record of what Israeli and international outlets have verifiably reported about Israeli forces' use of the Hannibal Directive and friendly fire on October 7, 2023 — alongside the established record of the Hamas-led massacre that day.

Four Hours in Shatila

Jean Genet

Genet's eyewitness account of the aftermath of the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre — four hours among the dead, written without flinching.

Elias Sanbar

1947–

Carried out of Haifa as an infant in 1948, he became the historian of Palestinian photography, Darwish's French translator, and Palestine's ambassador to UNESCO.

Ghassan Kanafani

1936–1972

One of the great Arabic novelists of the century and the Popular Front's spokesman, killed by a car bomb in Beirut in 1972 with his niece Lamis.

Ibrahim Abu-Lughod

1929–2001

He left Jaffa on the last ship out of the port in May 1948, built Arab-American scholarship in the United States for four decades, then returned to teach at Birzeit and be buried at home.

Izz al-Din al-Qassam

1882–1935

The al-Azhar-educated preacher who ministered to Haifa's dispossessed peasants, declared armed revolt against British rule in November 1935, and whose death in battle at Ya'bad helped ignite the Great Rebellion of 1936–39.

Leila Khaled

1944–

Driven from Haifa at four, she hijacked two airliners for the PFLP in 1969 and 1970 and has sat on the front's political bureau since 2005.

Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad)

1933–1991

The Jaffa-born co-founder of Fatah who ran the PLO's security apparatus, was among the first Palestinian leaders to advocate a two-state solution, and was assassinated in Tunis in 1991 by an agent of the Abu Nidal group.

Mornings in Jenin

Susan Abulhawa

A multi-generational family saga from a village near Acre to the Jenin refugee camp — the novel that brought the Palestinian story to millions of readers worldwide.

Returning to Haifa

Ghassan Kanafani

A Palestinian couple return to their Haifa home after 1967 and find their son — raised as an Israeli soldier — behind its door.

Filastin Newspaper Founded

1911

Isa al-Isa began publishing Filastin in Jaffa in January 1911. It addressed its readers as Palestinians, warned of the consequences of Zionist land purchase, and was shut down by the Ottoman authorities in 1913 for 'inciting ethnic prejudice.'

Ibrahimi Mosque Massacre

1994

Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein guns down twenty-nine Palestinian worshippers at Hebron's Ibrahimi Mosque during Ramadan; the restrictions imposed in response fall on Palestinians and hollow out Hebron's Old City.

Grapes of Wrath and the Qana Massacre

1996

During a sixteen-day Israeli offensive in Lebanon, artillery shells strike a UN compound sheltering displaced families at Qana, killing more than one hundred civilians.

Red Tuesday — the executions at Acre prison

1930

On 17 June 1930 the British Mandate hanged Fuad Hijazi, Muhammad Jamjoum and Atta al-Zir at Acre prison for the events of August 1929. The day entered Palestinian memory through the songs sung for them — above all the funeral song from Acre prison that is still sung a century later.

Sabra and Shatila Massacre

1982

During Israel's occupation of West Beirut, a Lebanese Phalangist militia massacres Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatila camps over three days.

The Suez War and the Kafr Qasim Massacre

1956

Israel joins Britain and France in a secret war on Egypt; on its first day, Border Police massacre 49 Palestinian citizens of Israel in Kafr Qasim.

Bethlehem Mother-of-Pearl

Nacre carved into crosses, rosaries, and models of the Church of the Nativity — a Bethlehem trade at least four centuries old, and for much of it a women's trade.

The Jaffa Orange

The Shamouti orange, bred by Palestinian growers near Jaffa in the mid-nineteenth century — Palestine's great export, and after 1948 a brand without its farmers.

From Acre Prison

Traditional — sung by Firqat al-ʿAshiqin

The funeral song for Fuad Hijazi, Muhammad Jamjoum and Atta al-Zir, hanged by the British at Acre prison on 17 June 1930. It went out with their funerals and never stopped being sung — in the camps, at commemorations, and inside the prisons.

Dunum

geography

The standard unit of land measurement in Palestine: one thousand square metres, or a tenth of a hectare. Roughly a quarter of an acre. Nearly every figure in the history of Palestinian land — ownership, cultivation, expropriation — is stated in dunums.

Al-Bassa

Acre

Al-Bassa was a large, prosperous Muslim-Christian village on the Lebanese border — a regional market center with schools, churches, and mosques. Punished by the British with a massacre in 1938, it was stormed by the Haganah in May 1948 and almost completely razed; its ruins lie inside Shlomi and Betzet.

Al-Birwa

Acre

Al-Birwa, on a rocky hill east of Acre, was a farming village of some 1,500 people — Muslims and Christians — and the birthplace of the poet Mahmoud Darwish. Captured in July 1948, it was destroyed almost entirely; a school, two shrines, and three houses are all that remain.

Al-Damun

Acre

Al-Damun was a village on the Na'amin River southeast of Acre, home of the Zayadina clan before they rose to rule the Galilee. Captured in July 1948 during Operation Dekel and razed, its people became mostly internal refugees in nearby Tamra and Kabul; its cemetery and ruined waterworks remain in the undergrowth.

Al-Ghabisiyya

Acre

Al-Ghabisiyya was a village northeast of Acre that had a non-aggression pact with its Jewish neighbors — yet the Carmeli Brigade attacked it anyway in May 1948. Its people fought for years in Israel's courts to return, and lost; only the mosque and cemetery remain, and villagers still pray outside the sealed mosque.

Al-Kabri

Acre

Al-Kabri was a stone village northeast of Acre whose famous springs supplied the city's water through Ottoman aqueducts. Punished for the ambush of the Yehiam convoy, it was occupied in Operation Ben-Ami in May 1948 and leveled; today only rubble and the cemetery remain, beside the kibbutz that took its name.

Al-Khayriyya

Jaffa

Al-Khayriyya — the Assyrian Banai Berka and Roman Beneberak, renamed 'the good, the giving' under the Mandate to distinguish it from Bnei Brak — dug trenches against attack from December 1947 before the Alexandroni Brigade seized it on 29 April 1948 in the encirclement of Jaffa. A handful of houses and a school survive within Giv'atayim's suburbs.

Al-Majdal

Gaza

Al-Majdal (Majdal Asqalan) was a market town of some ten thousand people, famed for its weaving, on the coastal plain north of Gaza. Captured in November 1948, its remaining residents were held under military rule and finally expelled to Gaza in 1950; the town became the Israeli city of Ashkelon's Migdal quarter.

Al-Manshiyya

Jaffa

Al-Manshiyya was the mixed Arab-Jewish quarter of Jaffa on the seafront north of the harbor. It fell to the Irgun in late April 1948 after a battle that drew in British armor, and its ruined streets were erased for a planned business district; the Hassan Bek Mosque and two other buildings are all that remain.

Al-Mujaydil

Nazareth

Al-Mujaydil stood on the Nazareth–Haifa road six kilometres southwest of Nazareth, the third largest village of its subdistrict with 1,900 people and 18,836 dunums in 1944/45, and the second largest olive producer in the district. A Golani Brigade unit took it on 14 or 15 July 1948 during Operation Dekel; the village was emptied and razed, and Migdal ha-Emeq was built on its land in 1952.

Al-Shaykh Muwannis

Jaffa

Al-Shaykh Muwannis stood on a sandstone rise north of the Awja river, a citrus village of 1,930 people holding 15,972 dunums in 1944/45, whose leaders had reached a truce understanding with the Haganah. In March 1948 the Irgun kidnapped five of its notables; the village emptied on 30 March. Tel Aviv University stands on its land, and the sheikh's Green House is the university's faculty club.

Al-Sindiyana

Haifa

Al-Sindiyana, the 'evergreen oak' village, stood on high ground twenty-nine kilometers south of Haifa, where Napoleon fought a battle in 1799. It was depopulated on 12 May 1948, in the last days of the Mandate; its fenced site is now grazing land strewn with the rubble of its houses.

Al-Tira

Haifa

Al-Tira, seven kilometres south of Haifa on the western slopes of Mount Carmel, was the most populous village of its subdistrict, with 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; after a siege of more than two months the village fell on 16 July 1948 under naval bombardment. Tirat Karmel was built on the site in 1949.

Al-Zeeb

Acre

Al-Zeeb was a fishing and farming village on the coast north of Acre, built over the Canaanite city of Akzib. It was taken on 14 May 1948 in Operation Ben-Ami, in the last hours of the British Mandate. Its domed mosque and the mukhtar's house still stand in the Achziv recreation area, beside kibbutzim founded on its lands.

Amqa

Acre

Amqa was a small Muslim village in the hills northeast of Acre, identified with the Talmudic Kefar Amiqo. It was captured in July 1948 during Operation Dekel and largely destroyed — only its mosque and school were left standing, used as warehouses by the moshav founded on its lands.

Ayn Ghazal

Haifa

Ayn Ghazal, on the wooded slopes of Mount Carmel south of Haifa, held out with Jaba and Ijzim in the 'little triangle' until late July 1948. Its people were expelled toward Jenin and Tulkarm, and its lands became moshav farmland and JNF forest.

Ayn Hawd

Haifa

Ayn Hawd, a Carmel hillside village south of Haifa said to descend from a commander of Saladin, was depopulated in July 1948. Its houses were never demolished: they became the Ein Hod artists' colony and its mosque a restaurant — while villagers who stayed built a new, long-unrecognized Ayn Hawd nearby.

Balad al-Shaykh

Haifa

Balad al-Shaykh, seven kilometres from Haifa, was the second largest village of its subdistrict with 4,120 people in 1944/45, and holds the grave of Izz al-Din al-Qassam. On 31 December 1947 a Palmach force of 170 men attacked it under orders to harm the largest possible number of men; more than sixty villagers were left for dead, women and children among them. The village was taken by the Carmeli Brigade on 24 April 1948 and is now Tel Hanan, part of Nesher.

Barbara

Gaza

Barbara, a grape-growing village in the coastal dunes south of Ascalon, kept a mosque holding the tomb of a fourteenth-century sage and was famed for its fruit and the long rugs woven by its women. It endured months of skirmishes before falling in the closing days of Operation Yoav in November 1948; rubble and old streets remain.

Beit Dajan

Jaffa

Beit Dajan — biblical Beth Dagon — stood at the crossroads south of Jaffa, a citrus village of nearly four thousand people with two schools. Raided through the winter of 1948, it fell in Operation Hametz at the end of April; a moshav took its name and its lands, and one surviving house serves as a synagogue.

Deir Yassin

Jerusalem

Deir Yassin, a small village west of Jerusalem, was the site of the best-known massacre of the 1948 war, when Irgun and Lehi fighters killed more than a hundred villagers on 9 April 1948. Its name became shorthand for the terror that drove Palestinian flight.

Ijzim

Haifa

Ijzim, one of the richest villages of the Carmel coast and seat of the al-Madi family, held out with two neighbors for months against Jewish forces, blocking the Tel Aviv–Haifa road. It finally fell on 24 July 1948 in Operation Shoter — a 'police action' launched during a truce — after a two-day bombardment that an Israeli officer said left 200 dead.

Iqrit

Acre

Iqrit was a Greek Catholic village in the northern Galilee whose residents left in November 1948 on the army's promise that they could return within weeks. Israel's Supreme Court ruled their evacuation illegal — but on Christmas Eve 1951 the village was demolished, and the people of Iqrit have been fighting to go home ever since.

Isdud

Gaza

Isdud — ancient Ashdod — was a market town of nearly five thousand on the coastal highway north of Gaza, with two mosques, three shrines, schools, a train station, and a Wednesday market. It was the Egyptian army's northernmost stand of 1948, falling in late October during Operation Yoav; modern Ashdod rose on its lands.

Jaba'

Haifa

Jaba' was a village on the western slopes of Mount Carmel whose fighters blocked the coast road for months in 1948. It asked to negotiate a surrender and got no answer; days into the second truce it was taken in Operation Shoter, and its people fled or were expelled. A lone shrine still stands over the rubble.

Kafr Lam

Haifa

Kafr Lam was a small grain-farming village on the coast south of Haifa, crowded inside the walls of an early Islamic ribat that the Crusaders called Cafarlet. Cleared of its people by July 1948, it escaped demolition thanks to its ruins; the fortress and several houses still stand within the moshav of HaBonim.

Kafr Saba

Tulkarm

Kafr Saba, a village on the coastal plain southeast of Qalqilya with shrines to two prophets, had pledged peace with its Jewish neighbors in December 1947 — yet the Alexandroni Brigade seized it two days before Israel declared statehood, driving its people toward Qalqilya. Modern Kfar Saba has spread over its lands, but old houses, the two shrines, and the cemetery remain.

Kuwaykat

Acre

Kuwaykat lay nine kilometres northeast of Acre on some of the most fertile land in the subdistrict, 1,050 people holding 4,733 dunums in 1944/45. Its militia repulsed attacks in January, February and June 1948; on the night the first truce ended, 9 July, the village was shelled without warning during Operation Dekel and its people fled. Kibbutz Beit HaEmek was founded on its lands in January 1949.

Qaluniyya

Jerusalem

Qaluniyya was a village on the Jerusalem–Jaffa highway whose name preserved the Roman Colonia founded on the ruins of Jewish Motza. Days after Deir Yassin, in April 1948, Haganah forces entered and blew up fifty of its houses; its ruins lie beside Motza, and Mevaseret Zion spreads over its lands.

Al-Qastal

Jerusalem

Al-Qastal was a tiny village on a commanding hill above the Jaffa–Jerusalem road. In April 1948 it became the pivot of the battle for Jerusalem: Palmach troops seized it during Operation Nachshon, and Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni, the best-known Palestinian commander of the war, was killed trying to win it back.

Qastina

Gaza

Qastina stood on the highway between al-Majdal and the Jerusalem–Jaffa road, its 890 people farming grain and citrus beside the British camp at Beer Tuvia. The Giv'ati Brigade seized it days after the first truce ended, in July 1948; Kiryat Malakhi and several settlements later rose on its lands.

Safsaf

Safad

Safsaf, seven kilometres from Safad, was the first village taken in Operation Hiram and the site of one of its massacres. Israel Galili, formerly head of the Haganah national staff, listed fifty-two men tied with a rope, dropped into a well and shot, ten of them killed, and three cases of rape; villagers told Nafez Nazzal that about seventy men were blindfolded and shot one after another in front of them. Its 910 people held 7,391 dunums in 1944/45.

Salama

Jaffa

Salama, the largest village on Jaffa's eastern approaches and home of the shrine of the Prophet's companion Salama Abu Hashim, fought off attack after attack from December 1947 — the Haganah's own history calls its December assault 'the first attack on an Arab village' — before falling on 29 April 1948. Its mosque, shrine, and shuttered houses stand inside Tel Aviv's sprawl.

Suhmata

Acre

Suhmata stood on two hilltops at six hundred metres in the upper Galilee, a village of 1,130 Muslims and Christians holding 17,056 dunums in 1944/45, with a Byzantine church of 555 CE and a Crusader castle on its ground. It was bombed from the air on 28 October 1948 and taken on 30 October by the Golani Brigade's First Battalion during Operation Hiram. The site was renamed Tzuriel and made ready for Jewish immigrants by May 1949.

Tantura

Haifa

Tantura, a coastal village south of Haifa, was captured in May 1948, when scores of its residents were killed — a massacre documented in Teddy Katz's contested thesis and revisited by Alon Schwarz's 2022 documentary "Tantura." The site now lies beneath the beaches of Dor.

Tarshiha

Acre

Tarshiha was a large Muslim-Christian town of the upper Galilee, a tobacco-growing and craft center, bombed and captured in Operation Hiram in late October 1948. Most of its people fled or were driven into Lebanon, but several hundred remained or returned; its old core survives inside the merged city of Ma'alot-Tarshiha.

Wadi al-Hawarith

Tulkarm

The people of Wadi al-Hawarith had farmed some 30,000 dunums of the coastal plain for three and a half centuries as tenants when, in 1929, the Jewish National Fund bought the land at a court auction from absentee heirs. Their resistance to eviction became the central land case of Mandate Palestine; the courts ruled against them in 1932 and the first expulsions followed in June 1933. The remaining villagers, 1,330 in 1944/45, left on 15 March 1948.

Yazur

Jaffa

Yazur — the Azuru of Sennacherib's annals and the birthplace of a Fatimid vizier — was bombed and raided for months from December 1947 before falling at the end of April 1948, as Operation Hametz encircled Jaffa. Two shrines and scattered houses still stand among the apartment blocks of Azor and Holon.

Zikrin

Hebron

Zikrin grew grain where the southern coastal plain meets the foothills of the Hebron mountains. The Giv'ati Brigade occupied it in late October 1948 during Operation Yoav; its site, known as Khirbet Dhikrin, is overgrown scrub marked by broken terraces, olive and carob trees, and the rubble of houses.

Acre

Western Galilee coast

Acre — Akka — is the walled city that broke Napoleon: a Phoenician port, the Crusaders' last capital, and an Ottoman citadel-town whose Old City is a UNESCO World Heritage site. Most of its people were expelled in 1948; among its exiled children was Ghassan Kanafani.

Dheisheh Camp

Bethlehem, West Bank

Established in 1949 on a third of a square kilometre south of Bethlehem, Dheisheh gathered the survivors of as many as 79 villages from six subdistricts — Hebron, Jerusalem, Ramla, Gaza, Bir al-Sabi' and Jaffa; Zakariyya, Bayt Nattif, Ras Abu Ammar, al-Walaja and al-Qabu among them — into one of the most politically formidable camps in Palestine.

Haifa

Haifa Bay, northern coast

Haifa grew under the Mandate into Palestine's great industrial port, a mixed Arab-Jewish city climbing Mount Carmel — until April 1948 emptied most of its Palestinian neighborhoods by sea. Kanafani's Returning to Haifa made it the literature's city of return.

Jaffa

Central coast, historic Jaffa District

Jaffa — Yafa, the Bride of the Sea — was Palestine's gateway and its orange capital until 1948, when most of its seventy thousand people were driven out by land and sea. A Palestinian community endures in Ajami, and the city's name still opens every account of the Nakba.

Khan Younis

Gaza Strip

Khan Younis began in 1387 as a Mamluk caravanserai on the Egypt road and grew into the Gaza district's second town; 1948 made its refugee camp one of the Strip's largest, November 1956 left it a massacre to mourn, and the war since 2023 has left much of the city in ruins.

Rafah

Gaza Strip

Rafah is ancient Raphia, the border town where armies have met since the pharaohs; 1948 filled it with refugees, 1956 left it a massacre to mourn, and the 2024 assault on the city — then sheltering over a million displaced people — was ordered halted by the International Court of Justice.

Shatila Camp

Beirut, Lebanon

A tent pitched on Beirut's outskirts by one man from Majd al-Kroum in 1949 became the camp whose name the world learned in September 1982. Shatila is the densest Palestinian camp in Lebanon: barely 70,000 square metres, destroyed twice, rebuilt vertically, and now shared with Syrians, Lebanese and migrant workers.

Tiberias

Sea of Galilee

Tiberias — Tabariyya — was sacred to Jews since the Sanhedrin sat by its shore, and Palestine's most evenly mixed city, until April 1948, when its entire Arab population was convoyed out in two days. The childhood town of Fayez Sayegh; most of its Ottoman old city was later demolished.

Tulkarm

West Bank

Tulkarm — the 'Mount of the Vineyard' — was the market town where the Samarian hills meet the coastal plain, until the 1949 armistice line took most of its fields; its refugee camp is among the largest in the West Bank, and its streets have known every army of the last century.

Yarmouk Camp

Damascus, Syria

Eight kilometres south of Damascus, Yarmouk was the capital of the Palestinian diaspora in Syria — its streets named for Haifa, Safad, Lubya and Jerusalem, home before 2011 to some 160,000 Palestinian refugees. The Syrian war emptied it — Al Jazeera counts some 160,000 forced to flee over its course — and those who stayed endured siege and starvation.

Palestinians did not exist before 1948 — they are an invented people

rhetoric

The documented record shows an Arabic-speaking Palestinian society with its own press, politics and institutions long before 1948 — the newspaper Falastin was founded in Jaffa in 1911 — and the claim mostly confuses the (normal) modernity of all national identities with non-existence.

Abdullah Nashwan

Eleven years old when his family fled the massacre at al-Dawayima in October 1948; displaced again in 1967, he has lived in Jordan's Baqa'a camp since.

Abed Abdi

A six-year-old expelled from Haifa in April 1948 recalls the crowds fleeing to the port; he returned with his family three years later and became a renowned visual artist.

Fahimi Zeidan

A twelve-year-old survivor of the 9 April 1948 massacre at Deir Yassin describes the killing of her family, in a statement recorded by British police officers days after the attack.

Ibrahim Abu-Lughod

A nineteen-year-old Jaffa high-school student, he sat his matriculation exams in March 1948 under nightly mortar bombardment — 'Daily we knew people who got killed. We buried them.' — and weeks later fled the falling city by sea.

Salwa Naser

Six years old when her family left Jaffa by boat in 1948, and a refugee for the second time in 2012 when the war in Syria destroyed her home in Damascus.

Wajiha al-Harsh

An 80-year-old refugee from Jaffa, living in the Jabaliya camp's 'Jaffa neighborhood' in Gaza, recalls the panic of the May 1948 flight from her city.

Zakaria Elnatour

A refugee from al-Sumayriyya, between Acre and Nahariya, describes the 1948 capture of his village and his family's flight to Lebanon and Syria, in a letter to a Jewish student.

Abdel Jalil Al-Fayoumi

c. 2001–

Abdel Jalil Al-Fayoumi, 22, survived the February 29, 2024 'flour massacre,' in which at least 112 Palestinians were killed around an aid convoy in Gaza City; after hours of searching he found the body of his 15-year-old cousin Moatasem at Al-Shifa Hospital.

Raed Mushtaha

Father of three killed waiting for flour in the 'flour massacre'

Raed Mushtaha, a father of three, was killed in the February 29, 2024 'flour massacre' in Gaza City; his brother Mohammed found his body on the coastal road and said he was killed by a tank shell fired into the crowd waiting for aid.

The Abu Ghazaleh family

Jaffa

A Jaffa mercantile family scattered by 1948 — oil dealers and ice makers whose ten-year-old son Talal walked out of the city a refugee and built the Talal Abu-Ghazaleh Organization in exile, spending a career insisting that the record show his birthplace as Jaffa.

The Dajani family

Jerusalem / Jaffa

Guardians of the Nabi Daoud shrine on Mount Zion and twice Jerusalem's mayors, the Dajanis were among the city's wealthiest houses before 1948 — with a Jaffa branch that carried the name into the PLO.