page_title: Ein Karem
section_title: British Mandate period
hierarchical_section_title: Ein Karem / History / British Mandate period
caption_attribution_description: English: Survey of Palestine maps
context_page_description: Ein Karem is an ancient village southwest of historical Jerusalem, and now a neighbourhood of the modern city, within Jerusalem District, Israel. It is the site of the Hadassah Medical Center. It was a Palestinian town in Mandatory Palestine's Jerusalem Subdistrict, depopulated during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War on July 16, 1948.
  Christian tradition holds that Saint John the Baptist was born in Ein Karem, this leading to the establishment of many churches and monasteries in the area. In 2010 the neighborhood had a population of 2,000. It attracts three million visitors a year, one-third of them pilgrims from around the world.
context_section_description: In the 1922 census of Palestine, conducted by the British Mandate authorities, the population of 'Ain Karim was 1,735; consisting of 1,282 Muslims and 453 Christians, increasing in the 1931 census to 2,637, in 555 houses.
  In the 1945 statistics, Ein Karim had a population of 3,180; 2,510 Muslims and 670 Christians, The total land area was 15,029 dunams, of this, a total of 7,960 dunums of land were irrigated or used for plantations, 1,199 were used for cereals; while a total of 1,704 dunams were classified as built-up (urban) areas.
  The 1947 United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine placed 'Ayn Karim in the Jerusalem enclave intended for international control. In February 1948 the village's 300 guerilla fighters were reinforced by a well-armed Arab Liberation Army force of mainly Syrian fighters, and on March 10 a substantial Iraqi detachment arrived in the village, followed within days by some 160 Egyptian fighters. On March 19, the villagers joined their foreign guests in attacking a Jewish convoy on the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem road. Immediately after the April 1948 massacre at the nearby village of Deir Yassin (2 km to the north), most of the women and children in the village were evacuated.
caption: Ein Karim and the surrounding area in the 1944 Survey of Palestine
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