Mentioned by Western travellers to the region in the 19th century, it is described by one as, "a picturesque Arab village"; by 1945, its population was 330 inhabitants.

[2][4] Until the period of Mandatory Palestine, the village was located at what is known in modern Israel as Tel Zayit; its population was moved 1.5 km north due to the nearby stagnant waters.

[7] During the British Mandate in Palestine, the village moved 1.5 km to the north, leaving the original site (known as Khirbat Zayta al-Kharab) on the southern bank of the wadi, as it was too close to waters that had become stagnant, breeding insects and disease.

The villagers paid a fixed tax rate of 25% on a number of crops, including wheat and barley, as well as on goats and beehives; a total of 3,500 akçe.

[10] During the 1834 Arab revolt in Palestine, Ibrahim Pasha, the Egyptian leader, personally led his troops to suppress the uprising, and upon encountering a group of rebelling peasants at Zayta, his forces killed 90 men there, and gave chase to the remainder.

[11] James Finn, the British Consul to the Ottoman Empire in the 1850s, recounts passing by Zayta while travelling between Gaza and Hebron in the spring of 1853.

A description of Zeita from the mid-19th century travels of James Turner Barclay notes that it is, "[...] a picturesque Arab village, situated on a conical hill.

And notwithstanding the water was rather warm and considerably muddied by a Fellah who was wading about in the deep fountain, or more correctly speaking, shallow well, yet so thirsty were we that we drank it with decided gusto.

The water, which is incessantly poured out of the jars, is received into a channel cut into a marble pillar laid horizontally, and thus delivered into a reservoir twenty-four feet square, and thence let off into a trough of masonry thirty-six feet long and two and half broad, the outer border of which is made up of marble pillars worked in horizontally, as in other instances.

At the bottom of the village is a well, wide and deep, consisting of a simple circular hole measuring three meters in diameter, and surrounded by a large stone belt, roughly hewn and uncemented.

[15][16] In the 1883, the PEF's Survey of Western Palestine described Zayta as a small hamlet built of adobe brick, on the edge of the wadi, flanked on two sides by low hills.

[8] In the 1940s, an Arab landowner who owned 1,200 dunams (1.2 km2; 0.46 sq mi) in Zeita, part of which was mortgaged to the bank, contacted Jewish purchasers to sell, as he was fearful of losing his holdings in other areas.