[4] Prior to 1948, the village had orchards, several olive presses, a winepress, in addition to a modern clinic, two coffeehouses, two carpentry shops, barbershops, a butcher, and a mosque.

[7] In addition, a small number of Jews resided in the village, and one former Jewish inhabitant described the relationship her family and the Palestinian Arab majority as 'excellent'.

[6] During the 1948 Palestine war, a massacre occurred on 28 December 1947, when a Jewish militia launched a machine-gun and grenade assault on a cafe in Lifa.

[16] Kitchener and Conder found the identification with Nephtoah unsatisfactory, and preferred to identify Lifta with Eleph of Benjamin (Joshua 18:28).

However, the Qasim al-Ahmad family remained powerful and ruled the region southwest of Nablus from their fortified villages of Deir Istiya and Bayt Wazan some 40 kilometers (25 mi) due north of Lifta.

[21] In 1838 Edward Robinson noted Lifta as a Muslim village, located in the Beni Malik area, west of Jerusalem.

[24] In 1863 Victor Guérin described Lifta as being surrounded by gardens of lemon-trees, oranges, figs, pomegranates, alms and apricots.

[26][27] The PEF's Survey of Western Palestine in 1883 described it as a village on the side of a steep hill, with a spring and rock-cut tombs to the south.

[29] In 1907 the German historian Gustav Rothstein was invited to Lifta by his Arabic language teacher, Elias Nasrallah Haddad.

[32] During the 1929 Palestine riots, according to one Israeli source, some villagers from Lifta were among gangs that participated in a number of robberies and attacks on nearby Jewish communities.

[38] Prior to 1948, the village, with a population of some 2,500 people, had orchards, several olive presses, a winepress, in addition to a modern clinic, two coffeehouses, two carpentry shops, barbershops, a butcher, and a mosque.

[6] In the 1947–48 Civil War in Mandatory Palestine Lifta, Romema, and Shaykh Badr which were strategically located on the road leaving Jerusalem to Tel-Aviv, were an operational priority for Jewish forces.

On 28 December 1947, the village suffered from what survivors called the “Lifta massacre” when a Jewish militia launched a machine-gun and grenade assault on the café of Salah Eisa.

Subsequently, Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni, while visiting the village, ordered the women, children and elderly to evacuate and the men to stay put.

[2] According to one resident, interviewed in 2021, there were are around 40,000 descendants of the original refugee population, dispersed in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Jordan and the Palestinian diaspora.

[8] After the expulsion of its Palestinian villagers, of Lifta's 410 homes, 60 stone houses, some three stories high, remained, together with its mosque, an olive press, and a tiled pathway to a spring.

[43][44] In 1984, one of the abandoned buildings in the village was occupied by the "Lifta gang", a Jewish group plotting the blow up the mosques on the Temple Mount, who were stopped at the gates of the site with 250 pounds of explosives, hand grenades, and other armaments.

They were made of ghabani, a natural cotton covered with gold color silk floral embroidery produced in Aleppo, and were narrower than other dresses.