[6] It was made up of five khirbets, including Khirbat al-Dayr where lie the ruins of St. Brocardus monastery and a cave complex with vaulted tunnels.

[8] Some scholars have suggested that the name Tireh reflects the town's history as the original location of Ancient Tyre.

[9] The Crusaders called al-Tira, St. Yohan de Tire,[10] and in the thirteenth century the village contained a Greek Orthodox abbey of St. John the Baptist.

[16] In 1596, al-Tira was a village with a population of 52 Muslim households, an estimated 286 persons, under the administrative jurisdiction of the nahiya ("subdistrict") of Shafa, part of Sanjak Lajjun of the Ottoman Empire.

Villagers paid a fixed tax-rate of 25% to the authorities for the crops that they cultivated, which included wheat, goats, beehives, and vineyards; a total of 26,000 Akçe.

This church, which has been constructed with very regular ashlars, is covered by slightly pointed vaults, above which there is a flat terrace roof.”[20] After the heavy conscription imposed by the Ottomans in 1872, there was a decline in the village's prosperity, but it subsequently recovered.

[26] Of this, Palestinians used 16,219 for cereals; 3,543 dunums were irrigated or used for orchards,[27] while a total of 901 dunams were built-up (urban) land.

[28] Shortly after the beginning of the 1948 Palestine war, on 11/12 December 1947 Tira was attacked by the terrorist organisation Irgun and thirteen residents were killed, "mainly children and the elderly" according to historian Ilan Pappé.

However, Petersen, who inspected it in 1994, reports that this is incorrect, and that an inscription set in an arched recess by the door to what was the entrance to the prayer hall records, in provincial nasskhi script, the construction of the mosque to Ishaq ibn Amir in 687 H. (1288-1289 CE).