Khan Yunis, Palestine: History of the Mamluk Khan and Its Weavers

Khan Yunis is one of the few Palestinian cities that is named after a building, and the building was a rest stop. Khan Yunis, Palestine grew up around the khan (خان), the walled caravanserai where couriers and merchant caravans on the road between Cairo and Damascus stopped for the night. The town took the name of the man who paid for it, an emir called Yunus, and then kept it for six hundred years. Its history is therefore a history of things passing through: post riders, pilgrims, armies, and eventually the displaced weavers whose looms carried a whole chapter of Palestinian heritage clothing south with them in 1948.

TL;DR

Khan Yunis is a city in the southern Gaza Strip, about 23 kilometres south-west of Gaza City and about 8 kilometres north-east of Rafah. It is named after the fortified caravanserai built in 1387 to 1388 (789 AH) by Yunus al-Nawruzi, the dawadar or executive secretary of the Mamluk sultan Barquq. The khan was roughly 80 metres square, with round corner towers, two storeys and a mosque, and it served the barid, the Mamluk postal network. Napoleon's surveyors mapped it as Kan Jounes in 1799. The British Mandate census counted 3,890 people in 1922 and 11,220 in 1945, farming 53,820 rural dunums. After 1948 the town roughly tripled overnight as refugees arrived from Bir al-Saba, Jaffa and al-Majdal, and the weavers among them brought the majdalawi loom tradition with them.

What Does the Name Khan Yunis Mean?

A khan is a caravanserai: a walled courtyard building where travellers, their animals and their goods could be locked in safely overnight. Yunus is a man's name. The city is, quite literally, the inn of Yunus.

The Yunus in question was Yunus al-Nawruzi, a senior Mamluk official who served as dawadar, the executive secretary, to Sultan al-Zahir Barquq in Cairo. He founded the khan in 1387 to 1388, which the foundation inscription records as the year 789 of the Hijri calendar. He was killed in battle two years later, in 1389, and never saw what his rest stop turned into.

That origin explains the town's position better than any other fact about it. It sits on the coastal road at the point where southern Palestine thins out toward the Sinai desert, roughly a day's ride from the next safe stop in either direction. The settlement exists because the distance between Cairo and Damascus needed breaking at exactly that spot.

The Khan on the Cairo Road

The building known locally as Barquq Castle, after the sultan rather than the man who built it, was a square of roughly 80 metres a side, about 6,400 square metres in all, with round towers at each corner. It rose two storeys and contained a mosque with an octagonal minaret. The inscription above records that the caravanserai was founded in the days of the sultan al-Malik al-Zahir Barquq.

Its working purpose was the barid, the Mamluk postal relay that carried official dispatches between Cairo and Damascus. Post riders changed horses and slept at fortified stations spaced along the route, and this was one of them. Merchant caravans and pilgrims used the same walls.

This is a different kind of Palestinian city origin than the ones that usually get written about. Nablus has its soap, Hebron its glass, Jaffa its oranges. This one began as infrastructure, a piece of state logistics dropped onto the coastal plain, and the town accumulated around it afterwards.

Ottoman Centuries, a French Map and a British Advance

Ottoman rule reached southern Palestine in 1516, after a minor engagement against the Mamluks near the town late that year. For the next four centuries it functioned as a market town for the surrounding farmland and for the Bedouin of the Negev, who came in to trade.

When Pierre Jacotin's surveyors mapped the country during the French invasion of 1799, they wrote the name down as Kan Jounes. By 1863 travellers were describing many fruit trees, apricots above all, planted through the gardens around the town.

The First World War brought the road back into use as a military route. After the British victory at Rafa on 9 January 1917, the Ottoman army pulled back through Khan Yunis toward Gaza and Beersheba, and by that summer the town lay behind British lines. The photographs on this page were taken in July 1917 by a New Zealand officer, Captain Arthur Rhodes, one from the tower of the khan itself.

Lesser-Known Facts About Khan Yunis

• The city is named for a Mamluk executive secretary, not a sultan, a saint or a prophet.
• Its founder, Yunus al-Nawruzi, died in battle in 1389, about a year after the khan was completed.
• The khan's mosque carried an octagonal minaret, whose upper section was altered by later rebuilding.
• The British Mandate census recorded 3,890 people in 1922 and 3,811 in the urban area in 1931, with a further 3,440 counted in the surrounding suburbs.
• Of the 53,820 rural dunums recorded around the town in 1945, 23,656 were under cereals and 4,172 were plantation or irrigable land.
• The Palestinian census of 2017 counted 205,125 residents in the city, making it the second largest urban centre in the Gaza Strip after Gaza City.

What Happened to Khan Yunis in 1948?

In the 1945 village statistics the town held 11,220 people, of whom 11,180 were Muslim and 40 Christian, with 2,302 dunums of urban land and 53,820 dunums of farmland around it. It was a substantial agricultural town, not a city.

Then the map changed. It fell inside the narrow strip of territory left under Egyptian administration after the 1948 war, and refugees moved into it in numbers the town had no capacity to absorb. Roughly 35,000 displaced people arrived, more than trebling the population, and the camp that formed beside the town in 1948 has been there ever since.

Where they came from matters for what follows. Most were from the Bir al-Saba area, the Negev district that had Beersheba as its administrative gateway. Others came from the port city of Jaffa and from al-Majdal on the coast to the north. By 2023 the United Nations relief agency had 95,550 refugees registered in Khan Younis camp alone.

The town that had been built to shelter people passing through became a permanent address for people who could not go home.

The Looms That Arrived With the Refugees

Al-Majdal, about 44 kilometres up the coast, was the weaving capital of Palestine. Its workshops ran several hundred hand looms through the late Ottoman period and roughly eight hundred by 1940, and in 1934 the town took first prize for textile manufacturing at the Arab National Exhibition in Jerusalem.

What came off those looms was majdalawi cloth: an indigo or black cotton ground crossed by bands of pink and turquoise, sold in lengths for making garments, with named patterns including jaljali, talhami and jannah wa nar, heaven and hell. Palestinian dress across the south was cut from it.

Al-Majdal was occupied on 4 November 1948 and its people were displaced, most of them into the Gaza Strip. As the Jerusalem Fund records in its account of the craft's survival, the weaving families, among them the Zaqout, Maleiha, al-Madhoun, Saalha, al-Hennawi and Abu Sharikh, scattered into the camps at Jabalia, al-Shati and Khan Younis. They carried their looms, their dye knowledge and their pattern sequences with them, and majdalawi weaving continued in Gaza for more than seventy-five years afterwards.

This is the part of the record that deserves more attention than it gets. A craft does not survive displacement automatically. It survives because specific families decide to set up a loom again in a tent, in a place that is not their town, and teach a child the warp sequence that belonged to a coastline they can no longer reach.

The threat is not abstract. A weaving tradition lives in the hands of a small number of families, and it lasts only as long as the chain of teaching holds. The loom sequences of al-Majdal have already had to be rebuilt once, by people who arrived with nothing else. When Palestinian embroidery was inscribed on the UNESCO list of intangible cultural heritage in 2021, the listing noted that the choice of colours and designs signals a woman's regional identity along with her marital and economic status. That grammar only holds as long as somebody still knows which colours belong to which place.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where is Khan Yunis in Palestine?

Khan Yunis is in the southern Gaza Strip, on the coastal plain of southern Palestine. It lies about 23 kilometres south-west of Gaza City and about 8 kilometres north-east of Rafah, on the historic road between Egypt and Damascus.

What does the name Khan Yunis mean?

It means the caravanserai of Yunus. A khan is a walled inn where travellers and merchant caravans stopped overnight, and Yunus was Yunus al-Nawruzi, the Mamluk official who founded the building in 1387 to 1388. The city grew up around it and kept the name.

Who built the castle at Khan Yunis?

Yunus al-Nawruzi, the dawadar or executive secretary of the Mamluk sultan al-Zahir Barquq, founded it in 1387 to 1388, recorded as 789 AH in its inscription. It is known locally as Barquq Castle after the sultan. It was roughly 80 metres square with round corner towers, two storeys and a mosque with an octagonal minaret, and it served the barid, the Mamluk postal network between Cairo and Damascus.

How did Khan Yunis change in 1948?

The town counted 11,220 people in the 1945 statistics. After the 1948 war roughly 35,000 refugees arrived, mostly from the Bir al-Saba area and also from Jaffa and al-Majdal, and a camp was established beside the town that year. By 2023 the United Nations relief agency had 95,550 registered refugees in Khan Younis camp.

What is Khan Yunis known for?

Historically, for its Mamluk caravanserai of 1387 and for the farmland around it, which carried more than 53,000 dunums of cereals, plantations and irrigated ground under the British Mandate. It is also one of the places where majdalawi weaving survived after the weavers of al-Majdal were displaced there in 1948.

A City Named After a Place to Stop

Most Palestinian city profiles are organised around what a place produced. Khan Yunis produced grain and fruit, but the thing it was actually built to do was hold people for a night and let them continue in the morning.

That function inverted in 1948. The town designed for transit became the terminus, and among the people who stopped there permanently were the weavers of a coastal town forty-four kilometres north, carrying the loom sequences for cloth that had dressed the whole south of the country.

The khan was a building for people in motion. What is kept inside it now is the memory of people who were moved.

Written for FALASTIN by Jad Sahyoun, with the assistance of AI tools and checked against Mamluk-period building records, Mandate census and land statistics, United Nations records and published accounts of majdalawi weaving.

At FALASTIN, we aim to keep that heritage alive through our Heritage Olive Tree collection.

100% of profits from FALASTIN are donated to the United Palestinian Appeal.