Deir Ballut was inhabited during
Mamluk rule in Palestine but was emptied of its residents in the 16th century. It was later resettled by people from
Kafr ad-Dik. Earlier remains, including
sherds from the
Iron Age,
Roman,
Byzantine,
Umayyad/
Abbasid and
Crusader/
Ayyubid eras have been found here. The "great valley" of
Wadi Deir Ballut was identified by
Charles William Wilson (1836–1905) as the boundary between
Judaea and
Samaria, as defined by first-century historian
Josephus.
Arab geographer
Yaqut al-Hamawi records in 1226 that "Deir al-Ballut was a village of district around
ar-Ramla."
Ottoman era In the 18th and 19th centuries, Deir Ballut belonged to the highland region known as Jūrat ‘Amra or Bilād Jammā‘īn. Situated between
Dayr Ghassāna in the south and the present
Route 5 in the north, and between
Majdal Yābā in the west and
Jammā‘īn,
Mardā and
Kifl Ḥāris in the east, this area served, according to historian
Roy Marom, "as a buffer zone between the political-economic-social units of the
Jerusalem and the
Nablus regions. On the political level, it suffered from instability due to the migration of the
Bedouin tribes and the constant competition among local clans for the right to collect taxes on behalf of the
Ottoman authorities." In 1838, it was noted as a
Muslim village,
Deir Balut, in
Jurat Merda, south of
Nablus. In 1870
Victor Guérin found it to be a village of one hundred and fifty people. However, judging by the extent of the ruins that covered the hill where it stood, Guérin thought it had once been a large city. Most houses were built with large stones. In 1882 the
PEF's
Survey of Western Palestine (SWP) described it as "a small village, partly ruinous, but evidently once a place of greater importance, with rock-cut tombs. The huts are principally of stone. The water supply is from
wells." To the west of the village are rock-tombs, from a Christian age.
WWI and British Mandate era During
World War I, Deir Ballut was the site of a minor engagement between
Turkish and British troops on March 12, 1918. In the
1922 census of Palestine Deir Ballut had a population of 384 inhabitants, all Muslim, rising to 532 in the
1931 census, still all Muslim, in a total of 91 houses. In the
1945 statistics the population was 720, all Muslim while the total land area was 14,789
dunams, according to an official land and population survey. Of this, 508 dunams were for plantations and irrigable land, 3,488 for cereals, while 63 dunams were classified as built-up (urban) areas. File:Deir Ballut 1943.jpg|Deir Ballut 1943 1:20,000 File:Biddya 1945.jpg|Deir Ballut 1945 1:250,000
Jordanian era In the wake of the
1948 Arab–Israeli War, and after the
1949 Armistice Agreements, Deir Ballut came under
Jordanian rule. In 1961, the population was 1,087.
Post-1967 Since the
Six-Day War in 1967, Deir Ballut has been under
Israeli occupation. After the
1995 accords, 5.2% of village land was classified as
Area B, the remaining 94.8% as
Area C. Israel has confiscated 171 dunums of village land in for the
Israeli settlements of
Peduel and
Alei Zahav. By 2020, there were reports about untreated sewage from the nearby Israeli settlements of
Leshem,
Peduel and
Beit Aryeh-Ofarim being dumped on Deir Ballut land. In January 2021 the
Israeli military authority had some 3,000 olive trees planted by the villagers uprooted. Many has been planted as long as 15 years earlier. The destruction, on the grounds that the area in question was, in Israeli law, Israeli state property, took place six days after a legal appeal had been made against the order. The authorities then stated that the uprooting occurred before knowledge of the filed appeal papers came to their notice. ==See also==