French Hill (settlement)

[4] The source of the name French Hill is the fact that the land belonged to the Catholic Monastery of St Anne, whose monks hailed mainly from France.

[5] In 1926 the Monastery donated a plot of land to build a reservoir to store water that was pumped from Ein Farah, to supply the city of Jerusalem.

An opening ceremony was held on 15 July 1926 and the location was reported in the newspapers as "the French Hill" (at the time in Hebrew in plural - Giv'at Ha'Zorfatim).

Then prime minister Levi Eshkol envisioned French Hill as the "first planned urban community in modern Jerusalem."

The ethnic mix is much more diverse than in most other Jewish areas in the city, partly due to the proximity of the Hebrew University and Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus.

[23] The French Hill intersection which connects northern Jerusalem to Maale Adumim and the Dead Sea has been the site of eleven Palestinian terror attacks.

"[24] In 2004, members of the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade shot and killed George Khoury, an Israeli Arab economics student, while he was jogging in French Hill, having mistaken him for a Jew.