It has been suggested that Jalbun is identical to
Gelbus, a place mentioned in
Eusebius'
Onomasticon.
Ceramics from the
Byzantine era have been found here.
Ottoman era In 1517 Jalbun was incorporated into the
Ottoman Empire with the rest of Palestine. During the
16th and
17th centuries, it belonged to the
Turabay Emirate (1517-1683), which encompassed also the
Jezreel Valley,
Haifa,
Jenin,
Beit She'an Valley, northern
Jabal Nablus,
Bilad al-Ruha/Ramot Menashe, and the northern part of the
Sharon plain. In 1838 it was noted as an inhabited village,
Jelbon, located in the District of Jenin, also called
Haritheh esh-Shemaliyeh district. In 1870
Victor Guérin found that Jalbun was divided into two quarters, with houses built of
adobe. In the centre was an ancient
mosque, situated east to west, which Guérin took to be a former
church. There were ancient
cisterns dug into rocks. In 1870/1871 (1288
AH), an Ottoman census listed the village in the
nahiya (sub-district) of Shafa al-Qibly. In 1882 Jalbun was described as a “small village in a remote position on one of the spurs of the Gilboa range. It is surrounded with plough-land, and built of mud and stone, and supplied by
cisterns”," in the
PEF's
Survey of Western Palestine.
British Mandate era In the
1922 census of Palestine, conducted by the
British Mandate authorities, Jalbun had a population of 410; 405 Muslims and 5 Christians, where the Christians were all Orthodox. The population increased in the
1931 census to 564, all Muslim, in a total of 119 houses. In the
1944/5 statistics the population of Jalbun, (including Kh. el Mujaddaa) was 610, all Muslims, with 33,959
dunams of land, according to an official land and population survey. 243 dunams were used for plantations and irrigable land, 19,104 for cereals, while 25 dunams were built-up (urban) land.
Jordanian era In the wake of the
1948 Arab–Israeli War, and after the
1949 Armistice Agreements, Jalbun came under
Jordanian rule. Israeli forces attacked Jalbun village, with small arms, on the 5 December 1949, they then expelled the inhabitants from their village causing fatal casualties amongst the villagers. The Jordanian government strongly protested against unwarranted Israeli action and called the UN Secretary-General to notify the
United Nations Security Council to take prompt and strict measures to return expelled Palestinians to their village, to hand back their looted belongings, and to compensate the villagers for all losses and damages. The Jordanian census of 1961 found 826 inhabitants.
post-1967 Since the
Six-Day War in 1967, Jalbun has been under
Israeli occupation. == Demography ==