The latter part of the town's name, '
Arab Sukrir could have derived from the
Canaanite name of the site, "Shakrun".
Ottoman era Under the
Ottoman Empire, in 1596, it was under the administration of the
nahiya of Gaza, part of the
Liwa of Gaza. With a population of 55 (10 households), all
Muslims. The villagers paid taxes on wheat, barley,
sesame, beehives, and goats; a total of 2,000
Akçe. The original inhabitants of the village were
Muslim Bedouins who gradually settled on the site, built stone houses, and became farmers.
Socin found from an official Ottoman village list from about 1870 showed that the place (called
Abu Suweirih) had 41 houses and a population of 105, though the population count included men, only.
Hartmann disagreed both about the number of houses, and the identification. Excavations at the site, today called Tel Mor, revealed traces of Late Ottoman
infant jar-burials, commonly associated with
nomads or
itinerant workers of
Egyptian origins.
British Mandate era In the
1931 census of Palestine, conducted by the
British Mandate authorities,
Abu Sweirah had a population of 530 Muslims. In the
1945 statistics the population of Arab Sukrir consisted of 390 Muslims while 966 dunams were non-cultivable.
1948 and aftermath On January 11, 1948, 'Arab Sukrir was subject to the first
Haganah operational proposal to level a village. An intelligence report reveals an official recommendation that "The village should be destroyed and some males from the same village should be murdered." On January 20, the official order was issued with directives to "... Destroy the well... destroy the village completely, kill all the adult males, and destroy the reinforcements that arrive." However, when the operation was carried out on January 25, the women and children had already evacuated a few days prior and the roughly 30 men who had remained to guard the village after hearing of the approach by the Haganah. Morris writes that the Israelis destroyed the houses, two trucks, and the nearby well, citing a report that said "The village, apart from a few relics, no longer exists." The
Associated Press reported that the Haganah bombed fifteen or twenty houses in an Arab village near
Yibna, but gave no casualty figures and quoted informants that the bombing were in retaliation for attacks on Jewish convoys.
Clermont-Ganneau visited the place in 1873, and gave a very similar description, with the addition: "this must have been the site of some ancient "manzel", or posting-house, on the Arab route from
Syria to
Egypt. The site was registered as "an ancient monument" during the
British Mandate of Palestine-period, although the owners were permitted to build a reservoir 20m square within the khan. Petersen, inspecting the place in 1994, found the place in much the same condition as during the British mandate period, except that the reservoir from the Mandate time is now replaced with a water-tower. Petersen described the remains as comprising a nearly 40 m-long wall, running north–south, with an entrance near the north end. A
barrel-vaulted chamber, with an interior measuring 8.3 m long and 3.8 m wide, is located inside the khan, just south of the entrance. In 2002. excavations in
Bnei Darom found major remains from the
Mamluk period. ==See also==