Lifta was one of the largest and wealthiest Palestinian villages in the Jerusalem region. Its 2,958 inhabitants were expelled in January and February 1948, in the opening weeks of the Nakba, the mass dispossession that displaced more than 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. The village has remained uninhabited since. Roughly fifty-five of its 450 stone houses still stand on the hillside, alongside the terraced olive groves, the village spring, the unfinished mosque, and the cemeteries. Some 40,000 descendants of the village’s refugees are scattered across East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Jordan, and the diaspora.
This map pairs 100 photographs of the village, most taken on a single afternoon in April 2017, with two from an earlier visit in May 2016, with the cartography of what Lifta was before 1948: its boundary, residential core, olive groves and agricultural terraces, and the named landmarks. Each photograph is geotagged to its place on the hillside and accompanied by a passage drawing on the historical and ethnographic literature.
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?photo=IMG_xxxx — shareable as a permalink.?photo=IMG_xxxx) you can share.The KML includes all 100 photos, every landmark, and the surrounding depopulated villages. Open it in Google Earth (Pro, Web, or mobile) to fly the village in 3D. Each placemark links back to this map.
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Population from the Ottoman tax register, the British Mandate censuses, and the 1945 Village Statistics, as compiled by Walid Khalidi and Palestine Remembered; land data from the 1945 Village Statistics. Superscripts link to the source.
Each entry is sourced; superscripts link to the reference. Dates and figures follow the cited works.
Every figure, date, and quotation on this map and in its narratives is tied to one of these sources, marked in the text by the superscript token shown here. Where a claim could not be verified against a source, it was left out. Full bibliographic detail is in the project README.
Lifta was one of the largest and wealthiest Palestinian villages in the Jerusalem region. Its 2,958 inhabitants were expelled in January and February 1948, in the opening weeks of the Nakba.
Photographs © 2016, 2026 Jeff O’Brien. All rights reserved.
Sources: Palestine Remembered · Walid Khalidi, All That Remains (1992) · Nazmi Jubeh, Lifta: Register of a People (IPS, 2021) · Golan, Orr & Ershied, Jerusalem Quarterly 54 (2013)