Bani Nai’m – Old City

Although most of the city’s 20,000 residents have moved into newer housing in the outskirts of Bani Na’im, the ruins of the Old City, dating back to the 1600s, still remain. The preserved houses are built in traditional Palestinian style, made of local limestone with arched roofs. The nearby quarries where much of this stone comes from are a major source of income for the residents of the city and were also once used to supply the sand for Hebron’s famous glass factories. In Roman times the town was known as Brekke, and after the Islam conquest, the city of Kafr al-Barik was renamed after the Bani Nai’m tribe that settled there in the 17th century.