They paid a fixed tax-rate of 33.3% on agricultural products, including wheat, barley and summer crops, in addition to occasional revenues; a total of 550 akçe.

In 1863 he scaled the nearby height, and in 1870 he noted that the place was named after a person who "is venerated there under a koubbeh partially constructed with regular stonework with an appearance of antiquity."

[10][11] In 1882, the PEF's Survey of Western Palestine described Neby Saleh as: "a village of moderate size on a ridge, with a small mosque and a well to the south.

It was at Nabi Salih that hundreds of men from Deir Ghassaneh and other villages of the Bani Zeid sheikhdom would interact with the wider Arabic-speaking Muslim community from Palestine and the Levant.

The prayer hall and tomb room are owned by the Islamic waqf authority, but is rented by the Nabi Salih Cultural Centre.

[21] Nabi Salih's residents have hosted weekly demonstrations since 2009 protesting what they describe as confiscation of the village's lands and the takeover of their spring by the nearby Israeli settlement, Halamish.

[24] According to an IDF officer who had served in the area, the protests started in 2009 over a plot of citrus trees, and beehives, which was set alight by settlers in a price tag attack.

The Israeli authorities have attempted to suppress the demonstrations the residents using tactics such as night incursions targeting homes and arrests of alleged stone throwers, including children.

[28] On December 11, 2011, Mustafa Tamimi was shot in the face by a teargas canister at close range and later died from his injury, becoming the first resident of Nabi Salih to be killed during a demonstration.

[31] Bassem al-Tamimi, one of the leaders of the protests, has been arrested twelve times by Israeli forces,[32] at one point spending more than three years in administrative detention without trial.

[51] In February 2011, B'Tselem volunteers filmed Israeli soldiers coming to the homes of Palestinian residents, waking and photographing children.

[52] A B'Tselem report[53] released in September 2011 accused Israel’s security forces of infringing the rights of the Palestinian demonstrators in Nabi Saleh.

[4] The village is located in the Raya Valley,[25]: 15  at an elevation of 570 meters above sea level along the mountainous chain running down the West Bank.

[1] A largely forested 3,500 ha site in the vicinity of the villages of Nabi Salih and Umm Safa has been recognised as an Important Bird Area (IBA) by BirdLife International because it supports a population of lesser spotted eagles.

In 2009 settlers from the nearby illegal Israeli settlement of Halamish took control over the spring and its surroundings and prevented Palestinian access to their land.

Subsequently, people of Nabi Salih and the nearby village of Dir Nizam began regular Friday protests for the spring, and against the Israeli occupation in general.