A small Palestinian Arab village during the Ottoman period; it was sold in 1872 with the entire Jezreel valley to the Lebanese Sursock family.

The majority Muslim and Christian population were removed, and replaced by Jewish immigrants, marking the foundation of modern Afula.

After the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Afula was settled by Jewish immigrants from Iraq, Yemen and Romania.

[4] An ancient mound or tell known as Tell ʿAfula, located in the heart of modern Afula, suggests almost continuous habitation from the Late Chalcolithic (fourth millennium BCE) to the Ayyubid period in the 13th century.

[5] At the beginning of the twentieth century the mound served as a refuse dump for the nearby Arab village of el-Fuleh.

[8] With the destruction of the Kingdom of Israel, the area continued to be inhabited, and excavations have revealed artifacts from the periods of Persian and Roman rule.

[9] Claude Reignier Conder suggested that ʿAfula was identical with Kirjath Ophlathah, a place inhabited by Samaritans in the 7th century.

[5] The gate is dated based on pottery findings to the Mamluk period (13th–14th centuries CE), but so far (after the June 2017 campaign) it could not be determined when fortress itself was built, since it is perfectly possible that just the gate was renovated in the Mamluk period; the square shape and the use of Roman sarcophagi as building stones is closely resembling the Crusader fortress at Sepphoris.

[11] A map by Pierre Jacotin from Napoleon's invasion of 1799 showed this place, named as Afouleh in a French transliteration of the Arabic.

[14] [15] William McClure Thomson, in a book published in 1859, noted that ʿAfula and the adjacent El Fuleh were "both now deserted, though both were inhabited twenty-five years ago when I first passed this way."

[18] Gottlieb Schumacher, as part of surveying for the construction of the Jezreel Valley railway, noted in 1900 that it consisted of 50-55 huts and had 200 inhabitants.

[19] In 1904 the Ottoman authorities inaugurated the Jezreel Valley railway, at first operating between Haifa and Beysan via ʿAfula and soon extended to Dera'a.

[citation needed] In 1917, when Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen from the British intelligence established contact with the Nili Jewish spy network in Palestine, a German Jewish doctor stationed at al ʿAfulah railway junction provided the British with valuable reconnaissance reports on Ottoman and German troop movements southwards.

A quarter of the one hundred Arab families who had lived in the area accepted compensation for their land and left voluntarily; the remainder were evicted by the new owners.

Sabotage actions of Jewish underground militias in 1945, 1946 and shortly before the 1948 Arab–Israeli War rendered first the connection to Jenin, then progressively the entire Valley Railway, inoperable.

[citation needed] Repairs to the Jezreel Valley Railway after 1948 restored service to Haifa, but only until 1949 when it was abandoned.

Very little of the initial six-acre tell remains due to construction work done in this area since the British Mandate period.

It was once widely considered to be the biblical site of Ophrah, the hometown of the judge Gideon,[41] but contemporary scholars generally disagree with this supposition.

[43] In 2012, excavations were conducted by the Israel Antiquities Authority on the southern peak of Tell ʿAfula where the Crusader-Mamluk fortress is located.

Fragments of glazed bowls from the thirteenth century (Mamluk period) were found along the southern edge of the excavation.