al-Jaladiyya

The village stood on a slightly elevated spot on the southern coastal plain, bordered on the southeast side by Wadi Suqrir. Secondary roads linked it to al-Faluja, in the south, to the highway leading to the town of al-Majdal, in the southwest, and to a number of the area's villages. The village may have been located on the site where the Crusaders had built the castle of Geladia. The scholars who participated in the late nineteenth century British survey and current Crusader scholars seem convinced that Geladia was built on the site of Khirbat Jaladiyya; they point to the fragments of architecture ('one block of a tower') as evidence of this. In 1596, al-Jaladiyya was a village in the nahiya of Gaza (liwa' of Gaza), with a population of eighty-eight. It paid taxes on a number of crops, including wheat, barley, and sesame, as well as on other types of produce and property, such as goats, beehives, and vineyards. It seems that the site may have been abandoned during the seventeenth century, however , and may not have been re-inhabited until the 1870s.

Al-Jaladiyya's inhabitants, all of whom were Muslim, built their houses of adobe and maintained a mosque in the village that was constructed in 1890 on the order of the Ottoman sultan Abd al-Hamid II (1876–1909). The mosque had two sections, one for prayer and another for teaching, and 43 students were enrolled in the mosque school by the mid-1940s. Rainfed agriculture was the basis of the economy. In 1944/45 a total of 4,185 dunums was allotted to cereals.