The name of the village literally translates from Arabic as 'the ruins of the sons of Harith' and receives its appellation from the Ottoman-era district of Bani Harith where the village was located.[3] The Bani Harith was a tribe which left its imprint in other neighboring sites. The Arabic Kharbatha is derived from the Aramaic Ḫarbatā or Ḫarbata, a toponym also meaning 'the ruin'.[4]
Kharbatha Bani Harith became part of the Ottoman Empire in 1517 with all of Palestine. In 1552, 'Kharbatha' was an inhabited village, and its tax revenues were endowed to the Haseki Sultan Imaret in Jerusalem. Administratively, the village belonged to the nahiya (subdistrict) of Ramla in the Gaza Sanjak.[6] In 1596 it appeared under the name of 'Harabta' in the Ottoman tax registers. It had a population of 29 Muslim and 4 Christian households.[7] They paid a fixed tax-rate of 25% on agricultural products, including wheat, barley, summer crops, vineyards, fruit trees, goats and beehives, in addition to occasional revenues; a total of 2,200 Akçe. All of the revenues went to a Waqf.[8]
In 1870, the French traveler Victor Guérin found the village to have about 200 inhabitants. He also noted the remains of a church,[9] which has been dated to the Byzantine era (4th–7th centuries CE).[5] In 1882, the Palestine Exploration Fund's Survey of Western Palestine described Kharbatha Bani Harith as being of medium size, with a well on the west, "standing on high ground among the olive trees".[10]
By the beginning of the 20th century, residents from Kharbatha settled Shilta near al-Ramla, establishing it as a dependency – or satellite village – of their home village.[11]
In the 1945 statistics the population of Kharbatha Bani Harith was 650, all Muslims,[14] who owned 7,120 dunams of land according to an official land and population survey.[15] Of these, 2,788 dunams were used as plantations and irrigable land and 591 for grain fields,[16] while the built-up area consisted of 9 dunams.[17]
After the Six-Day War in 1967, Kharbatha Bani Harith came under Israeli occupation. After the 1995 accords, 942 dunums of village land were classified Area B, the remaining 6,200 dunums as Area C. According to ARIJ, 833 dunams of village land has been confiscated by Israel for the Israeli settlement of Modi'in Illit.[19][20]
