Rehovot (Hebrew: רחובות, romanized: Reḥōvōt, pronounced [ʁeχoˈvot] / [ʁeˈχovot]) is a city in the Central District of Israel, about 20 kilometers (12 miles) south of Tel Aviv.

'wide expanses') based on Genesis 26:22: "And he called the name of it Rehoboth; and he said: 'For now the Lord hath made room for us, and we shall be fruitful in the land'.

[4] Rehovot was established in 1890 by pioneers of the First Aliyah on the coastal plain near a site called Khirbat Deiran, an "abandoned or sparsely populated" estate,[5] which now lies in the center of the built-up area of the city.

[6][7] According to Marom, Deiran offered "a convenient launching pad for early land purchase initiatives which shaped the pattern of Jewish settlement until the beginning of the British Mandate".

[5] Rehovot was founded as a moshava in 1890 by Polish Jewish immigrants who had come with the First Aliyah, seeking to establish a township which would not be under the influence of the Baron Edmond James de Rothschild, on land which was purchased from a Christian Arab by the Menuha Venahala society, an organization in Warsaw that raised funds for Jewish settlement in Eretz Israel.

[3][8] In March 1892, a dispute over pasture rights erupted between the residents of Rehovot and the neighboring village of Zarnuqa, which took two years to resolve.

Through the intervention of a respected Arab sheikh, a compromise was reached, with the Bedouins receiving an additional sum of money, which they used to dig a well.

Minkov's grove, surrounded by a wall, included a guard house, stables, a packing plant, and an irrigation system in which groundwater was pumped from a large well in the inner courtyard.

[12] In 1908, the Workman's Union (Hapoel Hazair) organized a group of 300 Yemenite immigrants then living in the region of Jerusalem and Jaffa, bringing them to work as farmers in the colonies of Rishon-le-Zion and Rehovot.

[14] Hundreds arrived starting in 1911 and were housed first in a compound one kilometre south of Rehovot and then in a large extension of the Sha'araim quarter.

[14] The second Zarnuqa incident took place in July 1913[15] between the colonists and guards of Rehovot, and the Arab rural population is considered by historians as a milestone in Zionist–Arab relations in late Ottoman Palestine.

This incident illustrates the difficult task facing historians in analyzing the late Ottoman Palestine, the period of the early Zionist–Arab encounter and conflict.

[16] It is alleged that this was the moment when a previously peaceful co-existence among Jews and Arabs, united under the Ottoman Empire, instantly became an "us vs. them" divisiveness that has prevailed ever since.

A few packing houses were built near the station to enable the fruit to be sent by railway to the rest of the country and to the port of Jaffa for export to Europe.

[23] On 29 February 1948, the Lehi blew up the Cairo to Haifa train shortly after it left Rehovot, killing 29 British soldiers and injuring 35.

The city has since then expanded in all directions, geographically surrounding but not including the Kibbutz of Kvutzat Shiller and the Moshav of Gibton.

Parts of Rehovot's suburbs are built on land that belonged to the village of Zarnuqa before 1948, population 2,620, including 240 Jews in Gibton.

There is a growing community of religious Anglo-speaking people who primarily live in Northern Rehovot around the Weizmann Institute of Science.

[1] The city is home to the Weizmann Institute of Science, the Faculty of Agriculture of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the Peres Academic Center College.

Although the entire extended science park is largely conceived as an area of Rehovot, the Kiryat Weizmann part is actually under the municipal boundaries of neighbouring Ness Ziona.

Tamar Science Park is home to branches of leading hi-tech like Stratasys, Imperva, Applied Materials, El-Op and bio-tech companies like Aleph Farms.

Route 412 (Weizmann Street) is a regional road that goes through the city centre in a Northwest-Southeast Direction, and connects it to neighbouring Ness Ziona.