al-Safiriyya

The village was situated on flat terrain on the central coastal plain. It was linked by a secondary road to a highway leading to Jaffa and Ramla, among other urban centers. AI-Safiriyya was known during the Byzantine era as Sapharea and lay within the boundaries of Diospolis (Lydda) sub-disctrict. In the early Islamic period Hani' al-Kindi, a Muslim scholar and ascetic [who had been offered the governorship of Palestine by the Umayyad caliph 'Umar ibn 'Abd al-'Aziz (A.D. 681–720) but had declined it], was buried in al-Safiriyya. The Crusaders called the village Saphyria. In 1596, al-Safiriyya was a village in the nahiya of Ramla (liwa' of Gaza) with a population of 292. It paid taxes on a number of crops, including wheat, barley, fruit, and sesame, as well as on other types of property, such as goats, beehives, and vineyards.

In the late nineteenth century, al-Safiriyya was a village built of adobe brick. The lands to the south of the village were planted with olive trees. During the Mandate the inhabitants of the village, all of whom were Muslims, built their adobe-brick houses very close to each other. AI-Safiriyya had two elementary schools, one for boys (opened in 1920) and another for girls (founded in 1945 with 45 students). By the mid-1940s there were 348 students enrolled in the boys' school, which had about 11 dunums of land for agricultural training.

The village was the largest tomato producer in the Jaffa sub-istrict; oranges were also grown on a large section of land. In 1944/45 a total of 3,539 dunums was devoted to citrus and bananas and 3,032 dunums were allocated to cereals; 3,708 dunums were irrigated or used for orchards. Archaeological evidence that the site had been occupied previously was visible in al-Safiriyya. In addition, Khirbat Subtara (138155), an artificial mound with reservoirs on its east and west sides, was nearby.