The village was on the north edge of a hill at the edge of a wadi bed, overlooking the Jezreel Valley and the Nazareth hills to the north and northeast. It was the smallest of a group of three villages (known collectively as al-Ghubayyat) located together; the others were Al-Ghubayya al-Fawqa and Al-Ghubayya al-Tahta. Next to al- Naghnaghiya was an artificial mound that bore the same name. Two kilometers to the southeast, on the highway to Jenin was Tall al-Mutasallim, identified with Megiddo.[3]
Naghnaghiya in historical context
History
In 1888, during Ottoman rule, an elementary school was built that was shared by the three al-Ghubayyat villages.[3]
In the 1945 statistics the population of Al-Ghubayya al-Fawqa, Al-Ghubayya al-Tahta and Naghnaghiya was 1,130, all Muslims,[6] and it had 12,139 dunams of land according to an official land and population survey.[7] 209 dunams were for plantations and irrigable land, 10,883 for cereals,[8] while no data were given for built-up (urban) land.[9]
Before the outbreak of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, on the night of the 12–13 April 1948, Naghnaghiya and the neighbouring village of al-Mansi were attacked by the Palmach, a Jewish militia.[4] By 15 April, both villages had been depopulated, and they were then blown up by the Jewish militia forces in order to block the return of the villagers.[11]
According to the Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi, describing the village in 1992: "The remains of houses are scattered on the slope of one hill. The site, traversed by the Haifa-Megiddo highway and partly occupied by an Israeli soccer field, is difficult to identify."[12]
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