Beit Hanoun is a city on the northeast edge of the Gaza Strip with a population of 49,000. It is located by the Hanoun stream, 6 km north of Gaza City, 5 km east of Beit Lahia, and just 6 kilometers west of the Israeli town of Sderot. There are twelve secondary, primary and agricultural schools in Beit Hanoun and an agricultural college which is related to al-Azhar University – Gaza. There is a medical center and hospital in the city and several clinics mostly managed by the United Nations.
Incorporated into the Ottoman Empire in 1517 with all of Palestine, Beit Hanoun appeared in the 1596 tax registers as being in the Nahiya of Gaza of the Liwa of Gazza. It had a population of 36 Muslim households and paid taxes on wheat, barley, summer crops, fruit trees, occasional revenues, goats and/ or beehives. Pierre Jacotin named the village Deir Naroun on his map from 1799. In 1838 Edward Robinson passed by, and described how “all were busy with the wheat harvest; the reapers were in the fields; donkeys and camels were moving homewards with their high loads of sheaves; while on the threshing-floors near the village I counted not less than thirty gangs of cattle..” In May 1863, the French explorer Victor Guérin visited the village. Among the gardens he observed indications of ancient constructions in the shape of cut stones, fragments of columns, and bases. Socin found from an official Ottoman village list from about 1870 that Beit Hanoun had 94 houses and a population of 294, though the population count included men, only. Hartmann found that Bet Hanun had 95 houses. In 1883 the Palestine Exploration Fund‘s Survey of Western Palestine described it as a small adobe village, “surrounded by gardens, with a well to the west. The ground is flat, and to the east is a pond beside the road.”
According to the Palestinian Authority, 140 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces in Beit Hanoun from September 2000 to November 2006. The Israeli army besieged Beit Hanoun from 15 May to 30 June 2003, during which it demolished dozens of houses, razed large areas of agricultural land and largely destroyed the civilian infrastructure of the town. During the Raid on Beit Hanoun in 2004, the town was besieged for 37 days. About 20 Palestinians were killed and again immense damage was caused to property and infrastructure. The infrastructure of Beit Hanoun was heavily damaged during an incursion by Israeli forces in 2005.
On 27 March 2007, sewage water flooded the northern Umm al-Nasser suburb of Beit Hanoun, killing five people. Following the removal of Israeli settlers from Gaza in August 2005 the 2006 shelling of Beit Hanoun, killed 19 Palestinian civilians. In December 2006, the UN appointed a fact-finding commission led by Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu to investigate the attack. However, Tutu and the other members were not granted permission to travel by Israel and the investigation was cancelled. Tutu’s final report to the United Nations human rights council concluded, however, that “[I]n the absence of a well-founded explanation from the Israeli military – who is in sole possession of the relevant facts – the mission must conclude that there is a possibility that the shelling of Beit Hanoun constituted a war crime.” Beit Hanoun was hit several times by shells and rockets during the 2014 Israel–Gaza conflict. The shelling of an UNWRA Elementary school by Israel killed 11-15 people, including women and children. The Israeli Defense forces claimed that “the IDF encountered heavy fire in vicinity of the school, including anti-tank missile… [and] that an errant mortar did indeed land in the empty courtyard of the school.”
