Iqrit
Iqrit (Arabic: إقرت or إقرث, Iqrith) was a Palestinian Christian village, located 25 kilometres (16 miles) northeast of Acre. Originally allotted to form part of an Arab state under the proposed 1947 UN Partition Plan, it was seized and depopulated by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, and their territory later became part of the new State of Israel.[6] All of its Christian inhabitants were forced to flee to Lebanon or the Israeli village of Rameh, and, despite the promise that they would be returned in two weeks' time, the villagers were not allowed to return. In 1951, in response to a plea from the Iqrit villagers, the Israel Supreme Court ruled that the former residents of Iqrit be allowed to return to their homes. However, before that happened, the IDF, despite awareness of the Supreme Court decision, destroyed Iqrit. Descendants of the villagers maintain an outpost in the village church, and bury their dead in its cemetery. All attempts to cultivate its lands are uprooted by the Israel Lands Administration.[7]
History
Antiquity: archaeological sites
The Canaanites erected a statue for the god Melqart of Tyre in the village. The village area contains mosaic floors, remains of a wine press, rock-hewn tombs, cisterns, and granite implements. There are many archaeological sites in Iqrit's vicinity.
Iqrit is identified with Yoqeret or Yokereth (Hebrew: יוקרת) a Jewish village mentioned in the Talmud, homeplace of Jose of Yokereth (Babylonian Talmud, Ta'anit, 23b).[8]
Ottoman period
Incorporated into the Ottoman Empire in 1517 with all of Palestine, Iqrit appeared in the 1596 tax registers as being in the nahiya (subdistrict) of Akka under the Liwa of Safad, with a population of 374 and an economy dependent largely on goats, beehives and agriculture. There was a press used for olives or grapes.[9][10]
In 1875, Victor Guérin passed by the village and was told that it was "very considerable" and inhabited by Maronites and Greek Orthodox Christians.[11]
In 1881, the Palestine Exploration Fund's (PEF) Survey of Western Palestine (SWP) called it Akrith, and described it as a village of stone buildings situated on a tell, with arable land including figs and olives, a modern chapel serving a Christian population of 100, and water supplied by three springs and a dozen rock-cut cisterns.[12]
British Mandate
Like a number of other villages in the area, Iqrit was linked to the coastal highway from Acre to Ras an-Naqura via a secondary road leading to Tarbikha. There were 339 people living in 50 houses in the census of 1931,[13] which rose to 490 by the 1945 statistics, comprising 460 Christians and 30 Muslims.[2] There was a total of 24,722 dunams (6,109 acres) of land according to an official land and population survey.[3] Of this, 458 dunams were plantations and irrigable land; 1,088 were used for cereals,[14] while 68 dunams were built-up (urban) land.[15]
At the time of their eviction in November 1948, there were 491 citizens in Iqrit, including 432 Melkites (Greek Catholics), inhabiting the entire area of the village. Some of the 59 Muslims of the village rented their homes in Iqrit while others had built houses in esh-Shafaya.
Only part of the village land was cultivated and the rest was covered with oak, laurel and carob trees. By 1948, the village owned about 600 dunams (600,000 m²) of private property with groves of fig trees that served all inhabitants of Iqrit and the surroundings. The groves covered the hill of al-Bayad, and the remaining cultivated land was used for crops of lentils, as well as tobacco and other fruit trees.
The village included a private elementary school administered by the Greek Catholic Archdiocese and a large Melkite (Greek Catholic) church, the latter of which remains standing. There were two natural water springs, and many wells and a large pool for collected rainwater. There were many threshing floors, mainly located between the built-up village lands and the cemetery.
Within the Arab–Israeli conflict
1972 Munich massacre
The operational name of the Munich massacre of Israeli athletes in 1972 was named by its perpetrators, the Black September Organization, "Iqrit and Bir'im", after the two Galilean villages.[23]
2023 war incident
On 26 December 2023, during the Israel–Hamas war, an anti-tank missile shot by Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon damaged a shed in the Iqrit church compound, but not the church itself.[24] The civilian man in his 80s who was guarding the church suffered moderate wounds.[24] As IDF troops and medical services were working to evacuate him, they were hit by further missiles, which resulted in nine soldiers being wounded, one of them seriously.[25][26]
Present buildings and land use
Israeli villages
Following the war, the area was incorporated into the State of Israel and a number of new Jewish villages were established there, two of them partially on Iqrit's land: Shomera (1949; built mainly on the ruins of Tarbikha), and Even Menachem (1960). Gornot HaGalil (1980) followed nearby. At the western entrance of Iqrit, there is now a cowshed that belongs to the moshav of Shomera.
Iqrit vestiges
The Melkite Greek Catholic church is the only building of Iqrit which remains standing. The fenced cemetery is annually maintained, on the road to the north. Uncleared rubble from the destroyed houses remains and there are overgrown fig, grape, almond, and olive orchards.
Iqrit 1939
