Al-Sufsafa, Haifa Subdistrict
Al-Sufsafa, also recorded locally as Khirbat Sufsafi, was a Late Ottoman rural estate on the dunes and low hills east of Caesarea Maritima and north-east of Pardes Hanna-Karkur in the Haifa Subdistrict. Established in the 1880s by Bosnian Muslim settlers in the Caesarea area, it formed part of a cluster of Bosnian-founded estates around Qisarya, together with sites such as al-Zughraniyya, al-Manshiya, Burj al-Kheil and Hudaydun.
Name
The Arabic toponym al-Sufsafa commonly denotes a willow/poplar and recurs across northern Palestine. Regional compilations on the al-Ruha' plain also note a village named Ṣafṣāfa among the Ruhaʾ localities.History
Following the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Bosnia, groups of Bosnian Muslim families were settled by the Ottoman authorities in and around Caesarea; several estates were established on nearby tracts. One of these was Al-Sufsafa / Khirbat Sufsafi, remembered locally with associated Bosnian owners from the Būshnāq family. Due to endemic malaria in the coastal wetlands, parts of the Bosnian community shifted residence between estates and the rebuilt town at Qisarya.By the late Mandate years the population composition around these tracts was changing as Bosnians moved to urban centers and Arab tenant farmers leased and worked nearby lands. Local testimony recalls that the manor at Al-Sufsafa was destroyed in the late 1940s amid the wartime upheavals; in the early state period the site hosted an IDF pack-mule base, active c.1950–1958, before falling into ruin again.