Saqiya

The village was situated on uneven terrain on the central coastal plain. A number of paved roads passing through or near the village afforded it easy access to Jaffa, Lydda, Tel Aviv, and adjacent villages as well. Its name meant 'irrigation canal' or 'water wheel.' In 1596, Saqiya was a village in the nahiya of Ramla (liwa' of Gaza) with a population of 270. It paid taxes on a number of crops, including wheat, barley, fruit, and sesame, as well as on other types of produce and property, such as goats, beehives, and vineyards. The Syrian Sufi traveller al-Bakri al-Siddiqi, who toured the area in the mid-eighteenth century, wrote that he passed through Saqiya when he was travelling to Jaffa.

In the late nineteenth century, the village of Saqiya had a well to the south. Its adobe brick houses stood close together. Some concrete buildings appeared in the later years of the Mandate, along with a modest expansion of the village. The population was Muslim. The village had a mosque, opened toward the end of the Mandate, and an elementary school for boys, established in 1936. This school acquired 16 dunums for agricultural training and had an enrollment of 136 students by the mid-1940s. The community worked primarily in agriculture, cultivating fruit, especially citrus, grain, and vegetables. In 1944/45 a total of2,422 dunums was devoted to citrus and bananas and 2,534 dunums were allotted to cereals; 145 dunums were irrigated or used for orchards.