Qastina

The village stood on an elevated spot in a generally flat area on the coastal plain, on the highway between the city of al-Majdal, to the southwest, and the Jerusalem–Jaffa highway. The British military camp, Beer Tuvia, was located 3 km southwest of the village. In 1596, Qastina was a village in the nahiya of Gaza (liwa' of Gaza), with a population of 385. It paid taxes on a number of crops, including wheat, barley, sesame, and fruits, as well as on other types of produce and property, such as goats, beehives, and vineyards. The Syrian Sufi traveler Mustafa al-Bakri al-Siddiqi, who traveled in the region in the mid-eighteenth century, reported passing through Qastina on his way to al-Masmiyya.

In the late nineteenth century, the village of Qastina was laid out in a northwest-southeast direction on flat ground. It had adobe brick structures, a well, and gardens. It had a mosque and an elementary school, founded in 1936 and shared with the neighboring village of Tall al-Turmus, to the southeast. In the mid-1940s, the number of students enrolled in the school was 161. The inhabitants, who were Muslim, obtained water for domestic use from wells. Agriculture constituted the backbone of the economy, with grain and citrus being the most important crops. In 1944/45 a total of 235 dunums was devoted to citrus and bananas and 7,317 dunums were allocated to cereals; 770 dunums were irrigated or used for orchards. In addition, people raised animals and poultry, and worked in the British military camp.