Palestine · West Bank · Hebron
Givat Harsina, Hebron — Area Guide & Where to Stay
Givat Harsina crowns a hilltop east of Hebron, an Israeli settlement a thousand metres up that Israel counts as a northern neighbourhood of Kiryat Arba.
About Givat Harsina
Where to stay in Givat Harsina
Each area has its own feel; here's who each one suits.
Givat Harsina is a residential hill under the Kiryat Arba local council, given over to houses, schools and synagogues. No hotel stands on Yoni Netanyahu. Rooms for a Hebron trip lie about two kilometres west, down in the city near the old town, and getting to them is a separate journey rather than a walk downhill.
The neighbourhood is entered from the east, off Route 60 and up through Kiryat Arba, while Palestinian Hebron is approached by its own roads and checkpoints. If your reason for coming is a household here or the Or Menachem Yeshiva, you are visiting rather than staying.
About Givat Harsina
What are the main landmarks in Givat Harsina?
Givat Harsina has no monument of its own, and the sites that bring visitors to Hebron all lie outside it. Two kilometres of hill separate them. The Cavern of the Patriarchs, the Hebron Museum, Karantina, the Shajar Al-Durr oil mill, Beit Shne'orson, the Hebron Observatory and the Hebron University Museum stand down in Hebron itself, west of the boundary drawn around Kiryat Arba.
What this hill holds instead is the Or Menachem Yeshiva, a yeshiva high school opened here in 1989, and the streets themselves: Yoni Netanyahu running the length of the ridge, and Derech Nofei Mamre dropping past Mamre Square toward the valley. Elonei Mamre, the ruin that gave the neighbourhood its official name of Ramat Mamre, lies under two kilometres north-west, well beyond the built-up edge.
What is the history of Givat Harsina?
Givat Harsina started in August 1976 as an unauthorised outpost, a few temporary structures put up on the hill by a group from Kiryat Arba and taken down again by the army. The government approved a neighbourhood here in 1979, and groundwork began on 1 January 1980. Hebron's mayor, Fahd Qawasmeh, and twenty-two others petitioned Israel's High Court of Justice that the land was privately owned, and the court dismissed them that February.
The first houses were occupied in 1983. The wider dispute outlasted the case: the International Court of Justice held in 2004 and again in 2024 that Israeli settlement in the West Bank breaches the Fourth Geneva Convention, the UN Security Council has said the same, and Israel rejects that reading.
Where is Givat Harsina?
Givat Harsina holds the north end of Kiryat Arba in the Judean Mountains, above Hebron westward and the Palestinian farmland of Wadi al-Ghrous below. Route 60 runs east.
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Updated September 2026