Turmus Ayya (Arabic: ترمسعيّا) is a Palestinian town located in the Ramallah and al-Bireh Governorate in the West Bank, in Palestine.
[4][5] During the Ottman era (1500 CE), the Palestinain village was registered under the name Turmus Ayya (Arabic: ترمسعيا) in historical survey records.
Michael Avi-Yonah and Shemuel Yeivin, noting phonetic similarities, have proposed that the name "Turmus" may have derived from the Latin word thermae, a public hot bath.
Turmus Ayya's climate is similar to that of the central West Bank, which is rainy in the winter, and hot and humid in the summer.
[11] A little northeast of Turmus Ayya is Khirbet Ras ad-Deir/Deir el-Fikia, believed to be the Crusader village of Dere.
French explorer Victor Guérin visited the village in 1870 and found ancient cisterns, a broken lintel with a garland carved upon it and the fragments of a column.
[20][21] In 1882, the PEF's Survey of Western Palestine Turmus Aya was described as "a village on a low knoll, in a fertile plain, with a spring to the south.
[32] In December 2014, the town was the site of the death of Palestinian official Ziad Abu Ein during a protest against Israeli occupation.
[4][5] According to B'tselem, in the six first months of 2023, Turmus Ayya was attacked ten times by Israeli settlers.
[40] Attacks continued throughout July 2024, with the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reporting that settlers had burned down farmhouses and generators on four consecutive days.
[3] Many of the villagers have moved to the Americas to seek economic opportunity, but they return regularly in order to keep their Palestinian ID.