Al-Bireh, Palestine: Ramallah's Twin City and Its Palestinian Roots
Al-Bireh, Palestine takes its name from a well. In Arabic, al-Bira (البيرة) means "the well," and the town that grew up around that water source now sits on the central ridge of the West Bank, at roughly 860 meters above sea level and about 15 kilometers north of Jerusalem. Its heritage, from Ottoman-era stone building to the cross-stitch dress patterns of the surrounding hill country, belongs to the same tradition the Palestinian heritage apparel at FALASTIN carries forward. Al-Bireh is administratively distinct from its western neighbor, Ramallah, but the two have grown into a single urban fabric, sharing one economy, one set of Palestinian Authority institutions, and one seat in the Palestinian Legislative Council. Long before either name meant anything to a modern map, a Seleucid general named Bacchides camped his army there in 161 BCE, a detail preserved because the site had already been a waypoint on the road between Jerusalem and Nablus for centuries.
Al-Bireh, Palestine: A Name Rooted in a Well
TL;DR
Al-Bireh (Arabic: البيرة, "the well") is a Palestinian city on the central ridge of the West Bank, roughly 15 kilometers north of Jerusalem at 860 meters elevation. It carries evidence of settlement back to the Bronze Age and was a Crusader-era fief before it was destroyed and rebuilt under the Ayyubids. Today it forms one continuous urban area with Ramallah, its administratively separate but functionally inseparable twin city, and the two share a single seat in the Palestinian Legislative Council. Al-Bireh's population has grown from under 3,000 under the British Mandate to 45,975 in the 2017 census, a share of them Palestinian refugee families who resettled there after 1948. It remains a working agricultural town, known for its olives, even as it hosts national institutions like the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics.
Archaeological remains around Al-Bireh go back to the Bronze Age, and the name itself has older layers than the modern Arabic. Under the Hellenistic rulers of the region it was known as Berea or Beroth, and it was there, in 161 BCE, that the Seleucid general Bacchides is recorded making camp. Crusader sources called it Birra, or, more formally, Magna Mahomeria: in 1099 the town was granted as a fief to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre by King Godfrey, a gift reconfirmed by Baldwin I in 1114, and by then it held a Frankish population estimated at several hundred. Saladin destroyed the town after his reconquest of the region in 1187; it stood empty for nearly a century before it was resettled, and it was the Ayyubids who built the mosque dedicated to Umar ibn al-Khattab, still standing beside the ruins of the earlier church.
From Ottoman Village to British Mandate Town
Al-Bireh was folded into the Ottoman Empire in 1517, and Ottoman tax registers from 1596 record it as a village of 45 Muslim households, taxed on wheat, barley, olives, and beehives, the same crops the surrounding hills still produce. By 1896 its population had grown to roughly 1,080. Under the British Mandate, which governed Palestine from 1920 to 1948, Al-Bireh's population rose from 1,479 residents in 1922 to 2,920 by 1945, a town still small enough that its identity was inseparable from agriculture and from its position on the road linking Jerusalem to Nablus.
How Did Al-Bireh Become Ramallah's Twin City?
Al-Bireh and Ramallah sit close enough that their built-up areas now touch without a visible seam, yet each keeps its own municipal government, its own mayor, and its own civic identity. What binds them administratively is the shared governorate that carries both names, Ramallah and Al-Bireh Governorate, and a shared electoral constituency: residents of both towns vote together for the Palestinian Legislative Council rather than as two separate seats. Jordan governed the West Bank, Al-Bireh included, from 1948 until 1967, by which point the town's population had reached 14,510. Israel occupied the West Bank in June 1967, and in the years that followed it confiscated roughly 346 dunams of Al-Bireh's land to establish the settlement of Beit El in 1977, and a further 780 dunams for the settlement of Pesagot in 1981, land that had been part of the town's agricultural base. In 1994, under the Oslo Accords, civil administration of Al-Bireh passed to the newly formed Palestinian Authority, and the town became, alongside Ramallah, the de facto administrative center of Palestinian governance in the West Bank, home today to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, the Palestine Broadcasting Corporation, and a campus of Al-Quds University.
Tatreez and the Roots of Ramallah and Al-Bireh Craft
Before 1948, a Palestinian woman's thobe could tell a stranger exactly where she came from, not from her face, from her chest panel. Ramallah's embroidery was bright red geometric cross-stitch on white linen, distinct from Bethlehem's couched silk and gold work or Hebron's deeper reds on a stricter grid. Al-Bireh, sharing Ramallah's hill country and its markets, shared that visual language too. The dress was a kind of map, drawn not by cartographers but by the women who lived on the land, a tradition explored at Tatreez: The Language of Palestinian Embroidery. The regional differences between that Ramallah-area cross-stitch and the styles of other Palestinian cities are laid out at Traditional Palestinian Clothing: Regional Styles and Patterns. What the twin cities shared in craft, they still share today. The same urban fabric that keeps Al-Bireh and Ramallah administratively separate but socially inseparable is what carried this embroidery tradition intact from one household to the next.
Why Al-Bireh's Population Growth Still Matters
Al-Bireh's population climbed from 27,856 in the 1997 census to 38,202 by 2007 and 45,975 by 2017, growth driven only partly by the town's own families. In 1997, 55.4 percent of Al-Bireh's registered residents were Palestinian refugees, families displaced from villages elsewhere in historic Palestine during the 1948 Nakba who resettled in and around a town that was never itself depopulated. Al-Bireh's continuity, the fact that it never stopped being a Palestinian town even as its neighbors were emptied, is part of why it became a place families rebuilt around rather than a place remembered only from exile. That continuity is also why its olive groves, its Ottoman-era mosque, and its shared life with Ramallah carry weight beyond the town's own borders.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Al-Bireh the same city as Ramallah?
No. Al-Bireh and Ramallah are administratively separate Palestinian cities, each with its own municipal government and mayor, but their built-up areas have grown together into one continuous urban center, and residents of both vote together for a single seat in the Palestinian Legislative Council.
How old is Al-Bireh?
Archaeological remains near Al-Bireh date back to the Bronze Age, and the site was recorded under the name Berea or Beroth in the Hellenistic period, including a mention of the Seleucid general Bacchides camping there in 161 BCE. It was later a Crusader-era fief before Saladin destroyed it after 1187 and the Ayyubids rebuilt it.
What does the name Al-Bireh mean?
Al-Bireh comes from the Arabic word for well. The name reflects the town's water source and its long history as a stop on the road between Jerusalem and Nablus.
Al-Bireh is a Palestinian city on the central ridge of the West Bank, older than its modern name and inseparable in daily life from Ramallah, the twin city it shares a legislature seat and an embroidery tradition with. Its population has nearly doubled since the 1990s, its old town still holds an Ayyubid-era mosque beside the ruins of a Crusader church, and its olive groves and hill-country cross-stitch connect it to the broader Palestinian heritage that outlasted every border drawn across it.
At FALASTIN, we aim to keep that heritage alive through our Palestinian Clothing collection.
100% of profits from FALASTIN are donated to the United Palestinian Appeal.