Byzantine city In the fifth century CE, a Byzantine city rose at the site, possibly one known from written sources as
Peleia, although there is no consensus about it. Remains from the fifth and sixth century CE have been found there, together with Byzantine ceramics. A fragment of a
Greek stone inscription discovered there is currently held at the
Louvre in Paris.
Crusader period Hamama was located outside
Ascalon and near the site of a
battle in 1099 between the
Crusaders and the
Fatimids, resulting in a Crusader victory. Mandatory archaeologists documented a marble slab (0.3x0.95 m) located on the western wall of the mosque of Ibrāhīm Abū ʿArqūb. This slab featured a nine-line Arabic inscription, now unfortunately lost, which was dated to 700 AH/1301 CE, and the content of which remains unrecorded. In 1432, it is reported that the Mamluk sultan
Barsbay passed through the village. In this period, a renowned scholar and preacher at the
al-Aqsa Mosque, Ahmad al-Shafi'i (1406–1465), was born there. Its residents came from various places, including the
Hauran, and
Egypt. During this time, the village functioned as an important stop between
Isdud and Majdal 'Asqalan along the Cairo-Damascus road. The seventeenth-century traveller
al-Nabulsi recorded that the tomb (qabr) of Shaykh Ibrahim Abi Arqub was located in the village,
Marom and
Taxel have shown that during the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries, nomadic economic and security pressures led to settlement abandonment around Majdal ‘Asqalān, and the southern coastal plain in general. The population of abandoned villages moved to surviving settlements, while the lands of abandoned settlements continued to be cultivated by neighboring villages. Thus, Hamama absorbed the lands of Ṣandaḥanna, Mi‘ṣaba, and excluded the lands of Bashsha, an exclave of al-Majdal. In 1838,
Hamameh was noted as a Muslim village in the Gaza district. Local administrative restructuring began in the 1860s as
tanzimat reforms were implemented at the district level. The construction of the "quarter system"—the partition of village land among groups of families—led to significant economic development, as evidenced by village land usage in the early twentieth century. He further noted: "The gardens of Hamama are outstandingly fertile. They are divided by living fences of huge cactus pears, and are planted with olive, fig, pomegranate, mulberry and apricot trees. Here and there slender palm trees and broad treetops of sycamore trees rise above them." An official Ottoman village list from about 1870 showed that
Hamame had 193 houses and a population of 635, although it only counted the men.
British Mandate Under the
British Mandate in Palestine, a village council was established to administer local affairs, Hamama had a
mosque, and two primary schools, one for boys and one for girls, established in 1921. British Mandate Ḥamāma had pre-planned new communities erected around the original village nucleus, with crisscrossed pathways separating the new residential quarters. where all the Christians were Orthodox. The population had increased in the
1931 census to 3,405; 3,401 Muslims and 4 Christians, in a total of 865 houses. In the
1945 statistics Hamama had a population of 5,070; 5,000 Muslims, 10 Christians and 60 Jews, while 167 dunams were built-up (urban) land. In the 1940s, British officials paved the road to the village for year-round automobile access. Two days later, a unit from Nitzanim opened fire on Hamama residents, killing one, and on February 17, a group of workers waiting for a bus on the road between
Isdud and the town were fired upon, wounding two. At the end of November 1948, Coastal Plain District troops carried out sweeps of the villages around and to the south of
Majdal. Hamama 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 Hamama. 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 it was noted: "No traces of village houses or landmarks remain. The site is overgrown with wild vegetation, including tall grasses, weeds, and bushes. It also contains cactuses. The surrounding land is unused."
Mohammed Dahlan's family and part of
Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib's family are originally from Hamama. == References ==