Qula

History

The Hospitallers built a tower and a vaulted building in Qula during the 1100s to serve as an administrative and tax collection center. By 1596, the village was part of the Ottoman Empire’s al-Ramla subdistrict within the Gaza district. It had 69 Muslim households, roughly 380 people, who paid taxes on goats, beehives, and a press for olives or grapes, plus a fixed sum totaling 6,650 akçe. In 1838, Edward Robinson spotted the village, which he called Kuleh, from atop the White Mosque in Ramla.

Victor Guérin, a French explorer, visited in 1870 and noted the village sat on a rocky hill, likely replacing an older settlement. He saw a large building, divided into homes, built with reused cut stones from older structures, possibly by Muslims or Christians during the Crusades. Another, smaller building had lower courses made of much larger, flat or bossed blocks and still functioned as a defensive tower, though its upper part was newer. A small mosque used materials that seemed at least half ancient, and its door had moldings suggesting a pre-Islamic origin.

Near the village, a pond measuring 18 by 12 paces was partly carved into rock and partly built from large polygonal blocks covered in thick cement, likely not Arab work. An Ottoman list from around 1870 recorded 159 men in 38 houses. In 1882, the Palestine Exploration Fund’s Survey of Western Palestine described Qula on a slope at a plain’s edge, with medieval relics and ancient remains. The mosque, about 10 meters east of the Crusader tower, had a large vaulted iwan and a smaller room with an inscription over its entrance.

During the British Mandate, the village grew along the Ramle-Tulkarm highway. Its center held the mosque, a few small shops, and a school founded in 1919, which by the mid-1940s enrolled 134 students.