page_title: Najd, Gaza
section_title: British mandate era
hierarchical_section_title: Najd, Gaza / History / British mandate era
caption_attribution_description: English: School building used by Yiftach Brigade as dining room, Najd, 1949
context_page_description: Najd was a Palestinian Arab village, located 14 kilometers northeast of Gaza City. During the British Mandate in Palestine, children from Najd attended school in the nearby village of Simsim. On 13 May 1948, Najd was occupied by the Negev Brigade as part of Operation Barak, and the villagers were expelled and fled.
context_section_description: As the population grew during the Mandate period, the village expanded northwestward. The village population was Muslim, and the children attended school in Simsim, 2 kilometers (1.2 mi) to the northeast. The villagers worked primarily in agriculture and animal husbandry. Fields of grain and fruit trees surrounded Najd on all sides. The fruit trees were concentrated to the north and northeastern sides, where irrigation water was available from wells.
  In the 1922 census of Palestine conducted by the British Mandate authorities, Nejd had a population of 305 inhabitants, all Muslims, while in  the 1931 census, Najd had 82 occupied houses and a population of 422 Muslims.
   
   
  By the 1945 statistics  the population  was estimated to be 620, all Muslims with a total of 13,576 dunams of land.  Cultivated lands in the village in 1944-45 included a total of 10 dunums allocated for citrus and bananas and 11,916 dunums for cereals. An additional 511 dunums were irrigated or used for orchards, while 26 dunams were  built-up, urban, land.
caption: School building used by Yiftach Brigade as dining room, Najd, 1949
exif: {"Image XResolution": "96", "Image YResolution": "96", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Centered", "Image ExifOffset": "90", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "274", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "6308", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "750", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "452", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard"}