Israel · Southern District
Where to Stay in Kiryat Gat, Southern District
Kiryat Gat is a Southern District city founded in 1954, north of Beersheba, holding Intel's Fab 28 plant and the mound of Tel Erani.
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Where to stay in Kiryat Gat
The right area depends on your trip — here's what each neighbourhood is best for.
Two very different reasons bring people to this city. Rooms in Kiryat Gat serve the Intel Fab 28 plant on one hand and the run of tel sites on the other, and the city is compact enough that the same bed answers for both without much re-planning. Crossing the city takes minutes.
A compact grid holds the whole municipality, so the choice of street matters less here than the choice of whether to stay in Kiryat Gat at all. None of the tel sites carries a city address. Tell el-Hesi, Tel Zayit, Tel Burna and Khirbet a-Ra'i are all names of their own, and a car turns them into one day's circuit rather than four separate expeditions from a hotel door.
Mitzpe Shai and Mishlat Ma'ahaz work the same way, and the Negba Open Air Museum is the one museum among them. Bigger beds lie further off. Beersheba, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem all hold far deeper hotel stock than Kiryat Gat does, and a traveller with a car can base in any of the three and still make the tels in a morning.
About Kiryat Gat
Chips and mounds, in one municipality.
What is Kiryat Gat known for?
Intel's Fab 28 plant puts semiconductor work inside Kiryat Gat, while Tell el-Hesi, Tel Erani, Tel Zayit, Tel Burna and Khirbet a-Ra'i account for five more names on the city's list. Three others complete it. Mitzpe Shai, the Negba Open Air Museum and Mishlat Ma'ahaz round out what the Southern District records for the place.
What are the main landmarks in Kiryat Gat?
Tels dominate the list. Tell el-Hesi, Tel Erani, Tel Zayit and Tel Burna carry that form between them, and Khirbet a-Ra'i sits with the same group under a name of its own kind. Three entries break the pattern.
Mitzpe Shai, Mishlat Ma'ahaz and the Negba Open Air Museum stand apart from the mounds, and Intel's Fab 28 plant accounts for the industrial name the city carries beyond them.
What is the history of Kiryat Gat?
1954 is the fixed date here. Kiryat Gat was founded in that year in the Southern District of Israel, fifty-six kilometres south of Tel Aviv and forty-three kilometres north of Beersheba, on ground that carries a set of separate site names of its own. Those names are the tels.
Tell el-Hesi, Tel Erani, Tel Zayit and Tel Burna each stand under their own label, and Khirbet a-Ra'i joins them without any street or address tying it to the city built in the fifties. Industry arrived later. Intel's Fab 28 plant produces semiconductors inside Kiryat Gat, which gives a city of the nineteen-fifties an industrial name that none of the surrounding site names shares.
Three more names fill out the record: Mitzpe Shai, Mishlat Ma'ahaz and the Negba Open Air Museum, the last of them a collection set in the open rather than housed in a building with rooms and a roof. Jerusalem lies further off. Kiryat Gat sits sixty-eight kilometres west southwest of Jerusalem, which puts it well outside that city's immediate reach and squarely inside the Southern District that administers it.
Where is Kiryat Gat?
The municipality is a small one. Kiryat Gat covers a little over sixteen square kilometres of the Southern District of Israel, and the named sites attached to it are separate places in their own right. Tel Burna and Tel Zayit are two of them.
Tell el-Hesi, Tel Erani, Khirbet a-Ra'i, Mitzpe Shai and Mishlat Ma'ahaz make up the rest, and the Negba Open Air Museum belongs to the same outer group.
What is the climate of Kiryat Gat?
The hot season runs long. Kiryat Gat sits in the subtropical band of the Southern District, which gives it a long hot season and a short wet one instead of an even spread across the year. The mounds feel it most.
Tel Burna, Tel Zayit and Tell el-Hesi are outdoor sites, so a walk over them is a different proposition in the hot half of the year than in the wet one.
How do you get to Kiryat Gat?
Three cities set the distances. Kiryat Gat lies fifty-six kilometres south of Tel Aviv, forty-three kilometres north of Beersheba and sixty-eight kilometres west southwest of Jerusalem, which makes any of the three a workable point of arrival. The last stretch needs wheels.
Tell el-Hesi, Tel Burna, Tel Zayit, Khirbet a-Ra'i, Mitzpe Shai and Mishlat Ma'ahaz all carry names of their own rather than city addresses, and a car is what turns them from a list into a route.
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Updated August 2026