Al-Mawasi, Rafah
neighborhood in Rafah, Rafah Governorate, Gaza Strip
Al-Mawasi (Arabic: المواصي) is a fertile area for agriculture in the Gaza Strip. It is along the coast and has many sand dunes. Al-Mawasi is fourteen kilometers long and one kilometer wide, making up about 3% of the Gaza Strip. It is a Palestinian Bedouin town and prior to the 2005 unilateral Israeli disengagement from the Gaza Strip, it was a Palestinian enclave within the Israeli settlements of Gush Katif. Al-Mawasi had a population of 1,409 in the middle of 2006. Prior to the Gaza war, al-Mawasi had a population of 9,000. It has a number of buildings with a maximum of 100 structures.
Region
The region's name derived from a traditional form of Palestinian dune agriculture, mawāṣī (مواصي). Al-Mawasi is known as the "Basket of Food" because of its fertile soil, underground water, and agricultural conditions.
History
Gaza war (2023-present)
Designation as safe zone
In December 2023, during the Gaza war, the Israel Defense Forces had designated Al-Mawasi as one of the only safe areas in the Gaza Strip.
“Al-Mawasi, Rafah” enters the record as neighborhood in Rafah, Rafah Governorate, Gaza Strip. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Al-Mawasi, Rafah and neighborhood can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4702878. VIAF identifies the subject as 181146461664127732438. Authority coordinates are 31.329, 34.230. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2005, 2006 and 2023.
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This entry incorporates text from “Al-Mawasi, Rafah” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.