Siris (Arabic: سيريس) is a Palestinian town in the Jenin Governorate in the western area of the West Bank, located 32 kilometers south of Jenin. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, the town had a population of 5400 inhabitants in mid-year 2006 and 6,020 by 2017.[1][3]Siris has an area of about 12,495 dunums, including 2,500 dunums of state land, about 7,500 dunums planted with olive trees, about 1,500 dunums of land, and the rest used for construction.
Location
Siris is bordered to the north by the villages of Al-Judeida and Sir. To the west is the town of Meithalun, to the south is the village of Yassid.
Siris, like all of Palestine, was incorporated into the Ottoman Empire in 1517. In the 1596 tax registers, Siris was part of the nahiya ("subdistrict") of Jabal Sami, part of the larger Sanjak of Nablus. It had a population of 12 households and 3 bachelors, all Muslims. The inhabitants paid a fixed tax rate of 33,3% on agricultural products, including wheat, barley, summer crops, goats and beehives, in addition to occasional revenues; a total of 2,030 akçe.[6]
In the 19th century the Egyptian leader Ibrahim Pasha passed with his forces through Siris during his conquests in the Levant and lived there after he failed to storm the neighboring village of Sanur.[citation needed]
In 1838, Edward Robinson noted the village when he travelled in the region, as bordering the extremely fertile Marj Sanur.[7] He listed it as part of the District of Haritheh, north of Nablus.[8]
In 1870 Victor Guérin noted the village, surrounded by groves of olives.[9]
In the 1945 statistics, the population of Siris was 830, all Muslims,[13] with 12,593 dunams of land, according to an official land and population survey.[14] 1,881 dunams were used for plantations and irrigable land, 2,884 dunams for cereals,[15] while 19 dunams were built-up (urban) land and 7,809 dunams were classified as "non-cultivable".[16]