Kawfakha

The village stood on a stretch of sandy, rolling land in the northern Negev. A network of secondary roads linked it to the highways between Gaza and Julis, which ran parallel to the coastal highway. Kawfakha was founded in the late nineteenth century by Gaza city residents who came to cultivate the surrounding land. At its center was a mosque that was well-known in the region, built during the reign of the Ottoman sultan Abd al-Hamid II (1876–1909). Houses were spread along a northwest–southeast axis in a rectangular pattern, adjacent to the southern bank of Wadi Abu Shunnar, a tributary of Wadi Hawdaj. Kawfakha had an elementary school and some small shops. Its inhabitants, who were Muslim, obtained water for domestic use from two wells inside the village. For agriculture, they relied on both rainfall and irrigation (from wells, cisterns, and reservoirs that collected rainwater in winter). They planted the land on the northern side of the village with fruit trees, such as apricots, olives, almonds, grapes, and figs, and grew grain on the other sides. In 1944/45 a total of 87 dunums was irrigated or used for orchards, and 7,768 dunums (of public land) were allotted to cereals. The village contained the ruins of Khirbat al-Kawfakha which included remnants of cisterns, marble columns, a Corinthian capital, mosaic walkways, and pottery.