Simsim (), known to the Crusaders as Semsem, was a Palestinian village, located northeast of Gaza. It was depopulated just prior to the outbreak of 1948 Arab-Israeli war. On 12 May 1948, pre-state Israeli forces expelled the villagers, along with those of the neighboring village of Najd. History Simsim contained two archaeological sites known locally as ar-Ras and Sha'fat al-Mughur (the latter of which contained a Roman cemetery). Byzantine ceramics have been found here. The village was known as Semsem to the Crusaders. Ottoman period Simsim was incorporated into the Ottoman Empire in 1517 with all of Palestine, and by 1596 it was part of the nahiya (subdistrict) of Gaza under the liwa' (district) of Sanjak of Gaza, and it had 20 Muslim households, an estimated population of 110. They paid a fixed tax rate of 33,3% on a number of crops, including wheat, barley and fruit trees, as well as on goats and beehives; a total of 6,800 Akçe. 14/24 of the revenue went to a Waqf. In 1838, Simsim was noted as was a Muslim village in the Gaza District. In A Handbook for Travellers in Syria and Palestine (1858), Josias Leslie Porter describes the village as standing "amidst a little grove of trees, about a 1/4 mile north of the road." In June 1863 Victor Guérin found the village to contains five hundred inhabitants. Surrounded by trees, the village had tobacco and sesame plantations. A oualy, dedicated to Neby Danyal, was internally decorated with two ancient columns. An Ottoman village list of about 1870 indicated 69 houses and a population of 119, though the population count included only men. In 1883, the PEF's Survey of Western Palestine described Simsim as being surrounded by gardens. It had a well, a pool, and an olive grove that was planted to the north. Karl Baedeker and his travelling companions writing in 1894 are more specific, noting that the village is located in an olive grove and that tobacco and sesame are the principal crops grown there. British Mandate of Palestine period In the 1922 census of Palestine conducted by the British Mandate authorities, Semsem had a population of 760 inhabitants, all Muslims, increasing in the 1931 census, when Sumsum had a population of 855 Muslims in 195 houses. In 1942, the kibbutz of Gvar'am was established on land traditionally belonging to the village. In the 1945 statistics, the population of