Al-Jura was a Palestinian village that was depopulated during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, located approximately two kilometers west of Majdal. In 1945, the village had a population of approximately 2,420 mostly Muslim inhabitants. Though defended by the Egyptian Army, al-Jura was nevertheless captured by Israel's Givati Brigade in a November 4, 1948, offensive as part of Operation Yoav. A 1998 estimate of the population of refugeestoday who are descendants of those who fled al-Jura, placed the figure at 17,000. The founder and spiritual leader of the Hamas organization Ahmed Yassin was born in al-Jura.
History
ceramics have been found here, together with coins dating to the seventh century CE.
In the 1596 Ottoman tax records, Al-Jura was located in the nahiya of Gaza, part of Sanjak of Gaza, named Jawrit al-Hajja. It had 46 Muslim households, an estimated population of 253; who paid a total of 3,400 akçe in taxes. The Syrian Sufi teacher and traveller Mustafa al-Bakri al-Siddiqi visited Al-Jura in the first half of the eighteenth century, before leaving for Hamama. In 1838, Edward Robinson noted el-Jurah as a Muslim village, located in the Gaza district. In 1863 the French explorerVictor Guérin visited the village, which he called Djoura, and found it to have three hundred inhabitants. He further noted that he could see numerous antiquities, taken from the ruined city, and that the inhabitants of the village grew handsome fruit trees, as well as flowers and vegetables. An Ottoman village list from about 1870 found that the village had a population of 340, in a total of 109 houses, though the population count included men, only. In the late nineteenth century, the village of Al-Jura was situated on flat ground at the outskirts of Ascalon. It was rectangular in shape and the residents were Muslim. They had a mosque and a school which was founded in 1919.
In the 1922 census of Palestine conducted by the British Mandate authorities, Jura had a population of 1,326 inhabitants, all Muslims, increasing in the 1931 census to 1,754, consisting of 1752 Muslims and 2 Christians, in a total of 396 houses. In the 1945 statisticsEl Jura had a population of 2,420 Muslims, with a total of 12,224 dunams of land, according to an official land and population survey. Of this, 481 dunams were used for citrus and bananas, 7,192 for plantations and irrigable land, 2,965 for cereals, while 45 dunams were built-up land. By the 1940s the school had 206 students.
1948 War
At the end of November 1948, Coastal Plain District troops carried out sweeps of the villages around and to the south of Majdal. Al-Jura was one of the villages named in the orders to the IDF battalions and engineers platoon, that the villagers were to be expelled to Gaza, and the IDF troops were "to prevent their return by destroying their villages." The path leading to the village was to be mined. The IDF troops were ordered to carry out the operation "with determination, accuracy and energy". The operation took place on 30 November. The troops found "not a living soul" in Al-Jura. However, the destruction of the villages was not completed immediately due to the dampness of the houses and the insufficient amount of explosives. In 1992, the village site was described: "Only one of the village houses has been spared; thorny plants grow on the parts of the site not built over by Ashqelon."
