[5] Incorporated into the Ottoman Empire in 1517 with the rest of Palestine, Saris appears in the 1596 tax records as a village in the nahiya (subdistrict) of al-Ramla under the liwa' (district) of Gaza with a population 17 Muslim households, an estimated 94 persons.

The villagers paid taxes on a number of crops, including wheat, barley, olives, goats and beehives a total of 6,000 Akçe.

[11] In 1838 Edward Robinson reported that the village belonged to the "Keis" faction, together with Laham Sheiks, of Bayt 'Itab.

"[17] In 1883, the PEF's Survey of Western Palestine (SWP) wrote that it was a moderate sized village, standing on a low hill.

Sheikh Samat, whoever he was, lies solitary enough and well forgotten in his airy sepulchre, but the whitewash covering his resting-place marks a custom which is universal with Mussulman tombs of this kind.

[26] Sar'a was captured by Israel's Harel Brigade on July 13–14, 1948, during the offensive Operation Dani in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

[27] Those who had remained fled when the mortar barrages from the approaching Harel columns began; the few that stayed throughout the assault were later expelled.

[5] According to the Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi, the remaining structures on village land in 1992 were: Stone rubble and iron girders are strewn among the trees on the site.

[31] In 2015, the Israeli documentarist Michael Kaminer, an inhabitant of Tzora, created the film Sar'a, in which he tracks his own journey of discovering and confronting the fact that his Kibbutz was built upon the ruins of the Palestinian village.