This page is subject to the extended confirmed restriction related to the Arab-Israeli conflict.Al-Ghabisiyya was a Palestinian Arab village in northern Palestine, 16 km north-east of Acre in present-day Israel.

[11] The village corresponds to that of Ghabiyya in the nahiya (subdistrict) of Akka, part of Sanjak Safad, in the 1596 C.E.

They paid a fixed tax-rate of 25% on agricultural products, including wheat, barley, fruit trees, cotton, and water buffalo; a total of 6,334 akçe.

[13][14] A map by Pierre Jacotin from Napoleon's invasion of 1799 showed the place, named as El Rabsieh.

[26] Despite these agreements, on May 21, 1948, the Haganah's Carmeli Brigade attacked al-Ghabisiyya as part of Operation Ben-Ami.

[27] The Carmeli troops "entered the village with guns blazing", killing a number of Palestinians, in what historian Saleh Abdel Jawad calls a massacre.

At that time, many of the residents went to Lebanon while others fled to nearby Arab towns and became Israeli citizens due to their registration in the October–November census.

[33] No alternative accommodation had been arranged, and the villagers took up temporary residence in abandoned houses of nearby Shaykh Dawud and Sheikh Danun.

The leaders of the leftist Mapam party condemned it, but they were undermined by the Mapam-dominated regional Jewish settlements bloc (one Mapam kibbutz of which was already cultivating al-Ghabisiyya's land) which declared that the "Arabs of Ghabisiyya should on no account be allowed to return to their village".

The mosque is in a run-down state and the cemetery, where our relatives are buried, is neglected and overgrown with weeds to such an extent that it is impossible to identify the graves any more.

The villagers appealed to Prime Minister Shimon Peres in April 1996, they received a reply on his behalf from one of his aides: The government of Israel regards itself as obligated to maintain the holy places of all religions, including, of course, cemeteries and mosques sacred to Islam.

The conflict was carried to the court in Acre, where the uprooted villagers contended that the government action was contrary to Israel's "Law of Preservation of Holy Places".