Ma'alul () was a village, with a mixed population of primarily Muslims with a substantial minority of Palestinian Christians, that was depopulated and destroyed by Israel during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Located six kilometers west of the city of Nazareth, many of its inhabitants became internally displaced refugees, after taking refuge in Nazareth and the neighbouring town of Yafa an-Naseriyye. Despite having never left the territory that came to form part of Israel, the majority of the villagers of Maalul, and other Palestinian villages like Andor and Al-Mujidal, were declared "absentees", allowing the confiscation of their land under the Absentees Property Law. Today, much of the former village's lands are owned by the Jewish National Fund. All that remains of its former structures are two churches, a mosque and a Roman era mausoleum, known locally as Qasr al-Dayr ("Castle of the monastery"). History In 1850, Rabbi Joseph Schwartz identified Ma'alul with the Biblical town of Nahalal. Ottoman era Incorporated into the Ottoman Empire in 1517, Ma'alul appeared in the census of 1596, located in the nahiya ("subdistrict") of Tiberias under the liwa' ("district") of Safad with a population of seventy-seven. It paid taxes on a number of crops, including wheat and barley, as well as goats and beehives. Ma'alul, and the neighbouring towns and villages of Nazareth, Mejdal, Yafa, Jebatha and Kneffis paid taxes to the monks of Nazareth, who bought the right to collect these taxes from the Ottoman authorities in 1777 for two hundred dollars. Thirty years later, they again purchased this right, though this time for two thousands five hundred dollars, owing to the rise in the price of cereals and ground rents. Pierre Jacotin called the village Matoun on his map from 1799. In 1859 the population was estimated to be 280, who cultivated 42 faddans of land. In 1875 Victor Guérin found Ma'alul to have 350 inhabitants; all Muslim except about 30 "Schismatic Greeks." By the late nineteenth century, the village was made of adobe bricks, built on a hill, Just outside the village was a magnificent Roman mausoleum, called Qasr al-Dayr. A population list from about 1887 showed that Ma'lul had about 650 inhabitants; all Muslims. British Mandate era At the beginning of the twentieth century, the people of Ma'alul were tenants of the Sursuq family of Beirut, absentee landlords who had acquired the village lands earlier. In 1921 the Sursuqs sold all but