Khirbat al-Zababida

The village stood on a low hill that was 1 km from the seashore. It overlooked the Wadi al-Faliq Basin, to the north, and an artificial canal, to the east, that flowed in a north-south direction and that was designed to drain the nearby marshland. A wide expanse of sand dunes bordered it on the west, and beyond this lay the coast. A secondary road linked Khirbat al-Zababida to the town of Qalqilya to the southeast. It was classified as a hamlet by the Palestine Index Gazetteer, and was inhabited by members of the Bedouin tribe of al-Nusayrat who had settled in this area at an unknown date. In the late nineteenth century, Khirbat al-Zababida was described as a moderate-sized village situated at the south edge of an arable plain. In 1944/45 a total of 344 dunums of village land was devoted to citrus and bananas and 3,839 dunums were allocated to cereals; 215 additional dunums were irrigated or used for orchards.