The village was possibly located at the site of the biblical
Shafir, mentioned by
Eusibius as a "beautiful town" between
Ascalon and
Bayt Jibrin. Most modern scholars, however, located Shafir at Khirbat al-Qawm. The
Crusader name of the village was Zeophir. They recorded that it was the property of
Bishop of Jerusalem in the early 12th century.
Ottoman era Incorporated into the
Ottoman Empire in 1517 with the rest of
Palestine, Al-Sawafir al-Shamaliya appears in the 1596
tax records as
Sawafir al-Halil. It was under the administration of the
nahiya of Gaza, part of the
Liwa of Gaza. The village contained 112 households, 71 were
Muslim and 41
Christians. With a total population of an estimated 616, the villagers paid a fixed tax-rate of 33,3 % on agricultural products, including wheat, barley, olive and fruit trees; a total of 19,550
akçe. All of the revenues went to a
waqf. In 1838 the three Sawafir villages were noted located in the Gaza district. The western village (=
Al-Sawafir al-Gharbiyya) was noted as "in ruins or deserted", while the two others were noted as being Muslim. In 1863, French explorer
Victor Guérin visited the village, which he estimated had five hundred inhabitants. He found three barrels of broken ancient
columns of gray-white
marble near a well. A
koubbeh there was dedicated to a
Sheikh Sidi Abd-Allah. An Ottoman village list of about 1870 found 55 houses and a population of 171, though the population count included men only. In 1882 the
PEF's
Survey of Western Palestine (SWP) found that al-Sawafir al-Shamaliyya had several small gardens and
wells.
British Mandate era In the
1922 census of Palestine conducted by the
British Mandate authorities, the village had a population of 334 inhabitants, consisting of 333
Muslims and 1 Christian, increasing in the
1931 census to an all-Muslim population of 454 in 77 houses. In the
1945 statistics the population of
Sawafir esh Shamaliya was 680 Muslims, while 21 dunams were built-up areas. Many of its houses were built of
adobe, although few were made of stone. The residents were
Muslim, and the village had its own mosque, but shared a school with the neighboring villages of
al-Sawafir al-Gharbiyya and
al-Sawafir al-Sharqiyya. The number of students in the school was 280 in the mid-1940s. Agriculture was the mainstay of the economy, and grain, citrus, grapes, and apricots were grown. Al-Sawafir al-Shamaliyya was captured by the
Haganah in
Operation Barak on May 12. Its residents may have been pushed out by the attack on
Bayt Daras on May 10 which was preceded by a mortar attack, but it's more likely that the village was depopulated on the attack of the village itself, according to an
Associated Press dispatch which quoted a Haganah source. At the near end of the
1948 Arab-Israeli War,
Egyptian and
Sudanese forces planned to recapture al-Sawafir al-Shamaliyya, but were prevented from doing so at an early stage. Following the war the area was incorporated into the
State of Israel, but the land was left undeveloped. According to Palestinian historian,
Walid Khalidi, "A few vacant houses and segments of houses, standing amidst wild vegetation, mark the site. One of them has a covered porch supported on two columns. An old village road is also identifiable, and cactuses and fig trees grow on the site." ==See also==