Burqin is an ancient site, situated on a slope, with old stones reused in the town houses. It was mentioned under the name
Burqana, in the 14th century BCE
Amarna letters, as one of several cities conquered by the
Canaanite warlord
Lab'ayu in the
Dothan Valley and southern
Jezreel Valley.
Pottery sherds from the
Early Bronze I, Early Bronze IIB,
Late Bronze III,
Iron Age I,
Iron Age II,
late Roman,
Byzantine,
Umayyad/
Abbasid, Medieval and early Ottoman era have been found. In 1799,
Pierre Jacotin placed the village, named
Berkin, nearly straight west of
Jenin on his map. In 1838
Edward Robinson placed Burqin as being in the District of Jenin, also called "Haritheh esh-Shemaliyeh". In 1863, when
Victor Guérin visited, he found the village to have about 1,000 inhabitants, all Muslim with the exception of 90
Greek Orthodox Christians. He further noted that "Some 30 excavated
cisterns are evidence that this village sits upon an ancient settlement." In 1870/1871 (1288
AH), an Ottoman census listed the village in the
nahiya (sub-district) of al-Sha'rawiyya al-Sharqiyya. In 1872,
Claude Reignier Conder visited Burqin during his surveying work in Palestine. He was met by the local
curé and shown the church. It had a stone screen on the east, shutting off three
apses. In 1882, the
PEF's
Survey of Western Palestine described
Burkin as "A village of Greek Christians, with a small modern church for the Greek rite. It stands on the side of a white hill, with a good well below on the north, and olives near it."
British Mandate era In the
1922 census of Palestine, conducted by the
British Mandate authorities,
Burqin had a population of 883; 871 Muslims and 12 Christians males, where all the Christians were Orthodox. This had increased in the
1931 census to a population of 1,086; 1,010 Muslim and 76 Christians, in a total of 227 inhabited houses. In the
1945 statistics the population were 1,540; 1,430 Muslims and 110 Christians, with a total of 19,447
dunams of land, according to an official land and population survey. Of this, 3,902 dunams were used for plantations and irrigable land, 11,219 dunams for cereals, while 36 dunams were built-up (urban) land. File:Burqin 1943.jpg|Burqin 1943 1:20,000 File:Biddya 1945.jpg|Burqin 1945 1:250,000
Jordanian era In the wake of the
1948 Arab–Israeli War, and after the
1949 Armistice Agreements, Burqin came under
Jordanian rule. In 1961, the population of
Birqin was 2,055.
Post 1967 Since the
Six-Day War in 1967, Burqin has been under
Israeli occupation. According to the 1967 Census, the settlement had a population of 2,036, of whom 415 originated from Israeli territory. On 21 July 2015 the 21-year-old Mohammed Ahmed Alauna of Burqin was shot dead during a confrontation with Israel forces who had entered the town on a night-time arrest mission. == Demography ==