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Welcome To Sajad - سجد (סג'ד)

District of al-Ramla days ago	العربية Google Earth
	Gallery(11)

Statistic & Fact

Value

Occupation Date

June 1, 1948

Distance From District

16 (km) South ofal-Ramla

Elevation

150 (meters)

Before & After Nakba, Click Map For Details what's new

Pre-Nakba Map showing before and after destruction

Pre-Nakba Aerial View what's new

Map Location

See location #53 on the map

View from satellite

Military Operation

Operation An-Far

Attacking Units

Giv'ati Brigade

Refugees' Migration Routes

The villagers most likely fled to the Hebron area.

Exodus Cause

Military assault by Zionist troops

Village Temains

Sajad is most likelydestroyed. Currently, its lands are being used by the Israeli army.

Ethnically Cleansing

Sajad inhabitants were completely ethnically cleansed.

Pre-Nakba
Land Ownership

Ethnic Group	Land Ownership (Dunums)*
Arab	cultivable
Jewish	0
Public	2,795
**Total	2,795

*Sourced from British Mandate'sVillage Statisitics
**Town Lands' Demarcation Maps

Land Usage
As of 1945

Land Usage	Arab (Dunum)*
Planted W/ Cereal	1,687
Built up	19
Arable	1,687
Non-Arable	1,089

*Sourced from British Mandate'sVillage Statisitics

Population

Year	Population*
1922	221
1931	300
1945	370
1948	429
Est. Refugees 1998	2,636

*Sourced from British Mandate'sVillage Statisitics

Number of Houses

Year	Number of Houses
1931	66
1948	94

Schools

In 1945, village students started to attend school at the nearby village of Qazaza.

Exculsive Jewish Colonies
Who Usurped Village Lands

Sajad's lands are used by the Israeli army.

Village Before Nakba

The village was located in a hilly region at the eastern edge of the central coastal plain. A secondary road linked it to a highway to the north that connected Gaza to the highway between Ramla and Jerusalem. Sajad was one of the first villages to benefit from the construction of a railway system in Palestine. In August of 1892 train service between Jaffa and Jerusalem was initiated on a line constructed for the Ottoman government by a French railway company; the train stopped in Sajad. The land cultivated by the villagers was originally owned by the Ottoman sultan 'Abd al-Hamid but was taken from him by the Ottoman government in 1908. It was classified as jiftlik land and was owned henceforth by the government but leased on a long-term basis to the inhabitants. In the early 1930s the Mandate government went to court in an effort to prove that the tenants had no hereditary rights to continue leasing the land (which in this case amounted to little more than paying taxes and registration fees on it). Apparently the government's case was vindicated, which may account for the categorization of all village land as 'public' in the census of 1945.

The village's entire population was Muslim. Sajad had no school of its own, but in 1945-46 it began to send its students to a school in Qazaza, a neighboring village to the southeast. The houses of the village were built with reused materials taken from the remains and foundations of earlier settlements on the same site.

Village Occupation and Ethnic Cleaning

According to Israeli historian Benny Morris, operations in the first half of June 1948 'precipitated the evacuation' of this and at least fifteen other villages in the area. The Israeli army's Giv'ati Brigade mounted an offensive known as Operation An-Far that aimed at linking the Israeli-held coast with the Negev and driving out the residents of the area south of Ramla (see Bi'lin, Gaza sub-disctrict). Sajad probably fell in the first stage of the operation, on 9-10 July, and its population reportedly fled to the Hebron area.