AL-GHĀBISIYYA – ACRE DISTRICT
33°0′3″N / 35°9′3″E
1948: Population 1,438; Houses 382
Occupation date: May 21, 1948
Occupying forces: Carmeli Brigade
Occupying operation: Operation Ben-Ami
Post 1948: In 1950, Iraqi Jews established Moshav Netiv HaShayyara on village land. In 1951, the villagers instituted proceedings against the Military Government of 1948−66 in the High Court of Justice in Israel. Despite the court ruling that the military governor had no authority to evict the petitioners or to prevent them from entering, leaving, or residing there,19 the court ruled as legal a new declaration by the Military Government that the village was a closed military area. As a consequence, villagers who had not managed to return to the village (almost all of them) were forbidden to go there without permission.20 In 1955 a paratrooper platoon conducted experimental explosions in five of the village’s houses during a training exercise, razing them to the ground,21 and the rest of the houses in the village were demolished later that year, leaving only the mosque.22 In 1996 the Shimon Peres government promised to help restore the mosques in former Arab villages, but was defeated and nothing done. In 1997 the Israeli Land Administration (ILA) claimed that al-Ghābisiyya had been “abandoned” in 1948 and began disputing that the village’s mosque had ever been a mosque at all, refusing the villagers’ appeals to return to using the mosque for prayer.23
Today: All that remains today is the shell of the mosque and the unkempt cemetery. The villagers still pray in the field outside the sealed mosque. The village site is now within the JNF’s Yeḥi‛am Forest.
Official Israeli name: None