List of towns and villages depopulated during the 1947–1949 Palestine war

Clickable map of the depopulated locations

During the 1947–1949 Palestine war, or the Nakba, around 400 Palestinian Arab towns and villages were forcibly depopulated, with a majority being destroyed and left uninhabitable. Today these locations are all in Israel; many of the locations were repopulated by Jewish immigrants, with their place names replaced with Hebrew place names.

Arabs remained in small numbers in some of the cities (Haifa, Jaffa and Acre); and Jerusalem was divided between Jordan and Israel. Around 30,000 Palestinians remained in Jerusalem in what became the Arab part of it (East Jerusalem). In addition, some 30,000 non-Jewish refugees relocated to East Jerusalem, while 5,000 Jewish refugees moved from the Old City to West Jerusalem on the Israeli side. An overwhelming number of the Arab residents who had lived in the cities that became a part of Israel and were renamed (Acre, Haifa, Safad, Tiberias, Ashkelon, Beersheba, Jaffa and Beisan) fled or were expelled. Most of the Palestinians who remain there are internally displaced people from the villages nearby.

A number of the towns and villages were destroyed by Israeli forces in the aftermath of the 1948 war, but it was not until 1965 that more than 100 remaining locations – including many of the largest depopulated places – were demolished by the Israel Land Administration. Shai, Aron. “The Fate of Abandoned Arab Villages in Israel, 1965-1969.” History and Memory, vol. 18, no. 2, 2006, pp. 86–106: "In the spring of 1965, the Israel Land Administration (ILA) initiated the demolition (or to quote contemporary records, “leveling”) of more than one hundred of these abandoned Arab villages. For about fifteen years prior to the ILA initiative, some of the abandoned villages had been demolished, with just their mosques or churches left standing, while others still stood deserted. Some of the villages were well preserved, while others bore the ravages of time; some had been settled with Jewish immigrants at the Israeli government’s initiative (figures 1–4). In villages where the houses had collapsed or were on the verge of collapse, the scars of IDF urban warfare exercises could sometimes be seen, and there were signs of looting and vandalism. However, it was only in the spring of 1965 that a clear policy was established to “level” the abandoned villages with the aim of “clearing” the country, to quote the official term used at the time. The operation, which was deliberately planned and executed, unlike its predecessor in the aftermath of the 1948 war, lasted until the few weeks of political and military tension before the June 1967 Six-Day War, and was subsequently continued after the war, and even expanded to include the newly occupied territories... The demolition program affected a large number of villages, including al-Burj, Bir Ma‘in (near present-day Modi‘in), Tall al-Safi, Zakariyya (in the Elah Valley), Abu Shusha and al-Qubab (southeast of Ramle), al-Khayriyya (near Jaffa; the place later became the central garbage tip), and in the north—Lubya (east of Tiberias), Dalaata (near Safed), and the small town of Saffuriyya (now the Tzippori national park)."

There are more than 120 "village memorial books" documenting the history of the depopulated Palestinian villages. These books are based on accounts given by villagers. Rochelle A. Davis has described the authors as seeking "to pass on information about their villages and their values to coming generations".

The towns and villages listed below are arranged according to the subdistricts of Mandatory Palestine in which they were situated.

Acre Subdistrict

 * Sha'ab

Haifa Subdistrict

 * Qisarya

Jerusalem Subdistrict

 * Romema