Wadi Salib (, ; lit. Valley of the Cross) is a primarily Palestinian neighbourhood located in downtown Haifa, Israel, on the lower northeastern slope of Mount Carmel, between the Hadar HaCarmel and the city's historic center and CBD. History Wadi Salib was established near the old city walls in 1761, shortly after modern Haifa had been established by Zahir al-Umar. The neighborhood was populated by Muslim and Christian Arabs until the mid-nineteenth century, when development in Haifa began pushing outwards to other parts of the city. After the arrival of Jewish residents in early the 20th century, Wadi Salib and nearby Wadi Nisnas remained the important Arab neighborhoods in Haifa. In the 1930s and 1940s, both were sites of numerous riots over British rule and increased Jewish immigration to British Mandate Palestine. By the end of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, 60,000 Arabs had left the city and few were permitted to return to their homes in Wadi Salib and other areas, as most of the buildings of Wadi Salib that had belonged to Palestinian refugees and internally displaced Palestinians were confiscated under the Absentee Property Law. The 3,000 Arabs remaining in the city, circa 8.5% of the total urban population of 268,000 previously living in Haifa, largely concentrated in the nearby neighborhood of Wadi Nisnas. Between May 1948 and March 1949, about 24,000 immigrants, many of them survivors of the Holocaust, were settled in the former Arab quarters of Wadi Salib. Moroccan Jews were soon to follow. Wadi Salib riots On the evening of 8 July 1959, a Mizrahi Jewish resident of Wadi Salib was shot and wounded by police in the course of a brawl. The next day, hundreds of residents marched in what was to become the first of a series of violent demonstrations against the government, the Labor Party and the Histadrut around the country. The riots in Wadi Salib awakened public awareness in Israel of the economic distress suffered by Jewish immigrants from the Arab countries. Newspapers of the time referred to the rioting as the "Moroccans' revolt." Arabs who moved back to Wadi Salib did not receive permits to build or renovate and the neighborhood became a slum. Yfaat Weiss of University of Haifa notes that "in the consciousness of the Israeli public, these Moroccan Jews and their history are associated with Wadi Salib, not the original Arab inhabitants." In the wake of the riot,