Hamama (; also known in Byzantine times as Peleia) was a Palestinian town of over 5,000 inhabitants that was depopulated during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. It was located 24 kilometers north of Gaza; its ruins are today in the north of the Israeli city of Ashkelon. History Remains from the fifth and sixth century CE have been found here, together with Byzantine ceramics. Hamama is identified as the fifth century CE Byzantine town of Peleia. Peleia translates as "dove", and when the Arabs conquered it through the Rashidun Caliphate in the seventh century, the town received its Arabic name Hamama meaning "dove", reflecting its Byzantine roots. Hamama was located near the site of a battle in 1099 between the Crusaders and the Fatimids, resulting in a Crusader victory. Later Hamama passed into Muslim Mamluk hands, and by 1333/4 CE (734 H.) some of the income from the village formed part of a waqf of the tomb (turba) and madrasa of Aqbugha b. Abd Allah in Cairo. In 1432, it is reported that the Mamluk sultan Barsbay passed through the village. In this period, a renowned scholar and preacher at the al-Aqsa Mosque, Ahmad al-Shafi'i (1406–1465), was born there. Ottoman era Hamama, like the rest of Palestine, was incorporated into the Ottoman Empire in 1517, and in the tax registers of 1596 it appeared as being in the a village in the nahiya of Gaza (Gaza Sanjak), with a population of 84 Muslim households, an estimated 462 persons. The villagers paid taxes on goats and beehives, in addition to occasional revenues; a total of 6,800 akçe. All of the revenue went to a waqf. The seventeenth-century traveller al-Nabulsi recorded that the tomb (qabr) of Shaykh Ibrahim Abi Arqub was located in the village, while the Syrian Sufi teacher and traveller Mustafa al-Bakri al-Siddiqi (1688-1748/9) visited Hamama in the first half of the eighteenth century, after leaving al-Jura. Hamama appears on Jacotin's map drawn-up during Napoleon's invasion in 1799, though its position is interchanged with that of Majdal. In 1838, Hamameh was noted as a Muslim village in the Gaza district. In 1863, the French explorer Victor Guérin visited the village, and noted a mosque constructed with ancient materials. The village had a population of "at least eight hundred souls". He further noted: "The gardens of Hamama are outstandingly fertile. They are divided by living fences of huge cactus pears, and are