History of Yanun

Byzantine pottery and other signs of ancient habitation including tombs carved into rock have been found at the village site. There are ruins of a Frankish church. In 1596, Yanun appeared in Ottoman tax registers as a village in the Nahiya of Jabal Qubal in the Liwa of Nablus. It had a population of 18 Muslim households and paid taxes on wheat, barley, summer crops, olives, goats or beehives, and a press for olives or grapes. Edward Robinson visited Yanun in 1852. He wrote that the village was mostly in ruins and only a few houses were inhabited. In the 19th century, Yanun was settled by some 50 Bushnaks, Muslims from Bosnia, after their country was ceded to the Austro-Hungarian Empire by the Congress of Berlin. The sultan Abdul Hamid gave the immigrants a significant part of the village. According to Haaretz, these were soldiers sent to reinforce Ottoman rule in Palestine. Adopting a common surname, Bushnak, they later moved to nearby Nablus and leased their farmlands to villagers from Aqraba who gradually left their village to settle in Yanun themselves. The villagers are their partners and descendents. In the 1870s, the Survey of Western Palestine described it as "A small village on the edge of a deep valley, with a sacred place to the east (Neby Nun), and a small spring about 1 mile to the north".

At the time of the 1931 census, Yanun had 22 occupied houses and a population of 120 Muslims. According to a land and population survey by the Mandatory government in 1945, Yanun had a population of 50 Arabs living in a built-up area of 34 dunams. Today, the village is still leased by the residents of Aqraba and payment for leasing the land could be made in the form of wheat, olive oil or cash. About three-quarters of Yanun's 16,000 dunams of land is still leased.

Recent history

According to Vikram Sura, Itamar settlers used to trade with local