Khan Yunis

This article is about the city. For the nearby refugee camp, see Khan Yunis refugee camp.

Khan Yunis
City in the Gaza Strip
Arabic transcription(s)
• Arabic	خان يونس
Municipal Seal of Khan Younis
Khan Yunis Location of Khan Yunis within Palestine
Coordinates: 31°20′40″N 34°18′11″E
Palestine grid	83/83
State	State of Palestine
Governorate	Khan Yunis
Founded	1387
Government
• Type	City
• Head of Municipality	Muhammad Jawad Abd al-Khaliq al-Farra
Area
• Total	54,560 dunams (54.56 km2 or 21.07 sq mi)
Population  (2017)
• Total	205,125
• Density	3,800/km2 (9,700/sq mi)
Name meaning	"Caravansary [of] Jonah"

Khan Yunis (Template:Lang-ar), also spelled Khan Younis or Khan Yunus, is a Palestinian city serving as the capital of the Khan Yunis Governorate in the southern Gaza Strip. It has been largely destroyed on account of the ongoing Israel–Hamas war.

Before the 14th century, Khan Yunis was a village known as "Salqah". To protect caravans, pilgrims and travellers a vast caravan serai was constructed there by the emir Yūnus an-Nūrūzī in 1387–88, an official of the Mamluk Empire.

According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, Khan Yunis had a population of 205,125 in 2017. Khan Yunis, which lies only four kilometres (2+1⁄2 miles) east of the Mediterranean Sea, has a semi-arid climate with temperature of 30 °C maximum in summer and 10 °C minimum in winter, with an annual rainfall of approximately 260 mm (10.2 in).

History

The southern part of the historic khan at Khan Yunis, 1930s

Ancient period

Herodotus describes a city named Ienysos (Template:Lang-grc) located between Lake Serbonis and Kadytis (modern Gaza city). He talks about how the Persian military marched through the location on its way to Egypt. He also describes how the coastal area between Kadytis and Ienysos was inhabited by local Arab tribes. Some sources, due to phonological resemblance of the names and due to the general matching of the geographic locations, associate this site with modern Khan Yunis.

Other sources have suggested a further inland location of "Khirbet Ma'in Abu Sitta" (Palestinian village depopulated in 1949, near modern kibbutz of Nir Oz) or the Egyptian town of Arish as possible locations of Ienysos, but there is no clear evidence to support this identification.

Ancient discoveries in Khan Yunis feature a lintel with a Greek inscription, discovered repurposed in the tomb of Sheikh Hamada. The inscription translates to: 'Hilarion - giving thanks to St. Georgius.' Originally housed in the Musée de Notre Dame de France in Jerusalem, the lintel is currently lost.

Establishment by Mamluks

Before the 14th century, Khan Yunis was a village known as "Salqah". To protect caravans, pilgrims and travellers a vast caravan serai was constructed there by emir Yūnus an-Nūrūzī in 1387–88, an official of the Mamluk Empire. The growing town surrounding it was named "Khan Yunis" after him. In 1389 Yunus was killed in battle. Yunus ibn Abdallah an-Nuruzi ad-Dawadar was the executive secretary (dawadar), one of the high-ranking officials of the Mamluk sultan Barquq. The town became an important center for trade and its weekly Thursday market drew traders from neighboring regions.

The khan served as resting stop for couriers of the barid, the Mamluk postal network in Palestine and Syria.

Ottoman period

In late 1516 Khan Yunis was the site of a minor battle in which the Egypt-based Mamluks were defeated by Ottoman forces under the leadership of Sinan Pasha. The Ottoman sultan Selim I then arrived in the area where he led the Ottoman army across the Sinai Peninsula to conquer Egypt. During the 17th and 18th centuries the Ottomans assigned an Asappes garrison associated with the Cairo Citadel to guard the fortress at Khan Yunis.

Pierre Jacotin named the village Kan Jounes on his map from 1799, while in 1838, Robinson noted Khan Yunas as a Muslim village located in the Gaza district. In 1863 French explorer Victor Guérin visited Khan Yunis. He found it had about a thousand inhabitants, and that many fruit trees, especially apricots were planted in the vicinity.

At the end of the 19th-century the Ottomans established a municipal council to administer the affairs of Khan Yunis, which had become the second largest town in the Gaza District after Gaza itself.

British Mandate

In the 1922 census of Palestine conducted by the British Mandate authorities, Khan Yunis had a population of 3890 inhabitants (3866 Muslims, 23 Christians, and one Jew), decreasing in the 1931 census to 3811 (3767 Muslims, 41 Christians, and three Jews), in 717 houses in the urban area and 3440 (3434 Muslims and 6 Christians) in 566 houses in the suburbs.

Khan Yunis 1931 1:20,000

In the 1938 village statistics, the population is listed as 4,379 (including three Jews) with 3,953 in nearby suburbs. In the 1945 statistics, Khan Yunis had a population of 11,220 (11,180 Muslims and 40 Christians), with 2,302 (urban) and 53,820 (rural) dunams of land, according to an official land and population survey. Of this, 4,172 dunams were plantations and irrigable land, 23,656 used for cereals, while 1,847 dunams were built-up land.

Khan Yunis 1945 1:250,000

During the Nazi occupation of the Dodecanese, many Greeks from Dodecanese islands such as Kastelorizo sought refuge in the nearby Nuseirat Camp.

1948–1967

During the night of 31 August 1955, three Israeli paratroop companies attacked the British-built Tegart fort in Khan Yunis from where attacks had been carried out against Israelis. The police station, a petrol station and several buildings in the village of Abasan were destroyed, as well as railway tracks and telegraph poles. In heavy fighting, 72 Egyptian soldiers were killed. One Israeli soldier was killed and 17 were wounded. The operation led to a ceasefire on September 4, forcing President Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Egyptian government to halt Palestinian fedayeen operations against Israel. One of the mechanized companies was commanded by Rafael Eitan.

Before the Suez War, Khan Yunis was officially administered by the All-Palestine Government, seated in Gaza and later in Cairo. After a fierce firefight, the Sherman tanks of the IDF 37th Armored Brigade broke through the heavily fortified lines outside of Khan Yunis held by the 86th Palestinian Brigade. It was the only site in the Gaza strip where the Egyptian army put up any resistance to the Israeli invasion of Gaza, but it surrendered on 3 November 1956.

There are conflicting reports of what happened. Israel said that Palestinians were killed when Israeli forces were still facing armed resistance, while the Palestinians said all resistance had ceased by then, and that many unarmed civilians were killed as the Israel troops went through the town and camp, seeking men in possession of arms.

The killings, dubbed the Khan Yunis massacre, were reported to the UN General Assembly on 15 December 1956 by the Director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, Henry Labouisse. According to the report, the exact number of dead and wounded is not known, but the director received lists of names of persons allegedly killed from a trustworthy source, including 275 people, of which 140 were refugees and 135 local residents.

After 1959, the All-Palestine Government of Gaza Strip was abolished and the city was included in the United Arab Republic, which was shortly disestablished and the Gaza Strip came under the direct Egyptian military occupation rule.

1967 and aftermath

The Kaware house in after bombing in 2014, see Kaware family home

In 1967, during the Six-Day War, Israel occupied Khan Yunis again.

As a result of the 1993-1995 Oslo Accords, Khan Yunis and most of the Gaza Strip (excluding Israeli settlements and military areas) were placed under the control of the Palestinian Authority.

Khan Yunis was the site of Israeli helicopter attacks in August 2001 and October 2002 that left several civilians killed, hundreds wounded and civilian buildings within the vicinity destroyed.

The Palestinian Authority came into control of the entirety of the Strip following the 2005 Israeli disengagement. However, following the Battle of Gaza in 2007, Hamas took over the Gaza Strip and established its own government in the region.

Israel–Hamas war

Main articles: Siege of Khan Yunis, Second Battle of Khan Yunis, and Third Battle of Khan Yunis

During the ongoing Israel–Hamas war, Israel has bombed Khan Yunis along with other cities in the Gaza Strip as part of an offensive against Hamas. The Israeli Air Force extensively bombed much of the city, including the Hamad City apartment complex. Local sources have reported numerous civilian casualties in Khan Yunis as a result of Israeli bombings, which Palestinian news agency Wafa put at "at least 70" as of December 3. The Al Qarara Cultural Museum was destroyed in an explosion as a result of an Israeli attack in October 2023, part of an offensive that reportedly targeted civilian homes and mosques in the vicinity. Israeli armored units began entering the outskirts of the city in December 2023. After several months of fighting, Israeli forces ended up withdrawing from Khan Yunis and most of the southern Gaza Strip. Having failed to root out Hamas from Khan Yunis, Israeli forces began a second invasion of the city in late July 2024, which also ended in an Israeli withdrawal.

Economy

Khan Yunis is the second largest urban area in the Gaza Strip after Gaza City. It serves as the principal market center of the territory's southern half and hosts a weekly Bedouin souk ("open-air market") mostly involving local commodities. As of 2012 Khan Yunis had the highest unemployment rate in the Palestinian territories.

Education

• University College of Science and Technology
• Al Quds Open University

Notable people

• Mohammed Shabir (1946 – 2023), former president of The Islamic University in Gaza
• Yahya Sinwar (born 1962), a Palestinian politician who has been leader of Hamas, the Sunni Islamist political and military organization that rules the Gaza Strip, since 2017.

International relations

See also: List of twin towns and sister cities in Palestine

Khan Yunis beach

Twin towns – sister cities

Khan Yunis is twinned with the following cities:

• Hamar, Norway
• Almuñécar, Spain
• Évry, France
• Bisceglie, Italy
• Alcamo, Italy

See also

• Khan Yunis massacre
• Palestinian refugee camps
• List of cities in Palestinian National Authority areas

Bibliography

• Barron, J.B., ed. (1923). Palestine: Report and General Abstracts of the Census of 1922. Government of Palestine.
• Department of Statistics (1945). Village Statistics, April, 1945. Government of Palestine.
• Derori, Zeʼev (2005). Israel's reprisal policy, 1953-1956: the dynamics of military retaliation. Routledge. ISBN 0714685518.
• Feldman, Ilana (2008). Governing Gaza: Bureaucracy, Authority, and the Work of Rule, 1917–1967. Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0822342403.
• Guérin, V. (1869). Description Géographique Historique et Archéologique de la Palestine (in French). Vol. 1: Judee, pt. 2. Paris: L'Imprimerie Nationale.
• Hadawi, S. (1970). Village Statistics of 1945: A Classification of Land and Area ownership in Palestine. Palestine Liberation Organization Research Center.
• Hathaway, Jane (2002). The Politics of Households in Ottoman Egypt: The Rise of the Qazdaglis. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521892945.
• Katz, Samuel M. (1988). Israeli Elite Units since 1948. Osprey Publishing. ISBN 0-85045-837-4.
• Karmon, Y. (1960). "An Analysis of Jacotin's Map of Palestine" (PDF). Israel Exploration Journal. 10 (3, 4): 155–173, 244–253. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2019-12-22. Retrieved 2016-07-15.
• Mills, E., ed. (1932). Census of Palestine 1931. Population of Villages, Towns and Administrative Areas. Jerusalem: Government of Palestine.
• Morris, B. (1993). Israel's Border Wars, 1949-1956: Arab Infiltration, Israeli Retaliation, and the Countdown to the Suez War. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-829262-7.
• Robinson, E.; Smith, E. (1841). Biblical Researches in Palestine, Mount Sinai and Arabia Petraea: A Journal of Travels in the year 1838. Vol. 3. Boston: Crocker & Brewster.
• Sacco, J. (2009). Footnotes in Gaza. New York: Metropolitan Books. ISBN 978-0-8050-7347-8.
• Sharon, M. (1999). Corpus Inscriptionum Arabicarum Palaestinae, B-C. Vol. 2. BRILL. ISBN 9004110836.
• Varble, Derek (2003). The Suez Crisis 1956. London: Osprey Publishing. ISBN 1841764183.

External links

• Khan Younis articles from UNWRA
• Welcome To The City of Khan Yunis
• close-up map of Gaza
• Air photo of Khan Yunis, 1946, with key to sites - Eran Laor Cartographic Collection, The National Library of Israel