one can make out perfectly the cupolas and minarets of Jerusalem," and that it counted 150 inhabitants. He described the houses as for the most part fairly old and vaulted internally. He noted the remains of a church called al-Kanisa, facing east. He thought it was a Frankish church. He also passed by in 1870. An official Ottoman village list from about 1870 showed 23 houses and a population of 90, counting men only. In 1883, the Palestine Exploration Fund's Survey of Western Palestine described Shuafat as "A small village, standing on a flat spur immediately west of the watershed, surrounded with olive-trees. It has wells to the north. There is a sacred chapel of Sultan Ibrahim in the village." In 1896 the population of Scha'fat was estimated to be about 276 persons. The Ottomans built a road in the same place as the old Roman road linking Jerusalem to Nablus. British Mandate period In the 1922 census of Palestine conducted by the British Mandate authorities, Sha'afat had a population 422, all Muslims, increasing in the 1931 census to 539, still all Muslims, in 123 houses. In the 1945 statistics the population of Shu'fat was 760, all Muslims, and it had 5,215 dunams of land according to an official land and population survey. 484 dunams were for plantations and irrigable land, 2,111 for cereals, while 62 dunams were built-up (urban) land. Jordanian period The town of Shuafat was to be the most northernmost point of the corpus separatum proposed in 1947 for Jerusalem and its surrounding villages, which "in view of its association with three world religions" was to be "accorded special and separate treatment from the rest of Palestine and should be placed under effective United Nations control". In mid-February, during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni, leader of Palestinian irregulars in the area, tried to persuade the residents of Shuafat to attack the neighbouring Jewish village of Neve Yaakov but the invitation was declined. On 13 May the villagers were evacuated on orders from the Arab Legion. Shortly afterwards the Palmach captured Shuafat, destroying many of the buildings. Shuafat was then occupied by Jordan, which annexed the West Bank in April 1950. Jordan's king Hussein also built a palace here. In 1961, the population of Shuafat was 2,541, of whom 253 were Christian. Shuafat refugee camp In the wake of the 1948 war, the Red Cross accommodated