have stemmed from its inhabitants' exemption from army service and the village's reputation as a refuge, including for criminals evading government pursuit. According to local tradition, two brothers whose descendants formed Deir al-Asad's Dabbah clan settled in the village's upper neighborhood in the 18th century. Nineteenth century Deir al-Asad possessed a large fortified monastery called St. George. The site's earlier Christian inhabitants relocated to Bi'ina, where they built a new monastery, giving to it the same name as the former. In 1838, Deir al-Asad was noted as a village in the Shaghur district, which was located between Safad, Acca and Tiberias. Deir al-Asad and nearby Bi'ina were both inhabited by members of the Druze community when Victor Guérin visited in the 1875, but by the late 1870s, they had emigrated to the Hauran to avoid conscription by the Ottoman army. In the PEF's Survey of Western Palestine (SWP) in 1881, Deir al-Asad was described as a village of 600 Muslims, containing a few ruins of the original Christian settlement. It was surrounded by olive trees and arable land, with a spring nearby. A population list from about 1887 showed that Deir al-Asad had about 725 inhabitants, all Muslims. British Mandate period In the 1922 census of Palestine, conducted by the British Mandate authorities, Deir al-Asad had a population of 749, all Muslim, increasing in the 1931 census to 858, still all Muslims, living in total of 179 houses. By the 1945 statistics, Deir al-Asad had 1,100 inhabitants, all Muslims. They owned a total of 8,366 dunams of land, while 7 dunams were public. 1,322 dunams were plantations and irrigable land, 1,340 used for cereals, while 38 dunams were built-up (urban) land. Israel Units from the Arab Liberation Army evacuated Deir al-Asad and Bi'ina on 29 October 1948. Village notables officially surrendered to Israeli forces the next day and Israel's Golani Brigade entered on 31 October. The inhabitants of both villages were assembled in the central square of Bi'ina where Israeli troops picked four men at random, two from each village, and had them executed in a nearby olive grove. A further 270 men were transferred to a prisoners-of-war camp while the remainder of the inhabitants were temporarily ousted to the environs of nearby Rameh. Israeli troops looted the villages then allowed the inhabitants to return after a few days. On 5 November Israeli troops blew up three houses in Deir