ḤELEẒ

ḤELEẒ (Heb. חֶלֶץ), site of Israel's first oil field, which exploits oil-bearing strata discovered in 1955. It is located near a moshav of the same name in the southern Coastal Plain of Israel, 7½ mi. (12 km.) S.E. of ashkelon . In the later stages of the war of independence (1948), a hard battle was won there against the invading Egyptian army. The moshav, affiliated with Tenuat ha-Moshavim, was founded in 1950. Its first settlers came from Yemen, but later immigrants from Tunisia   took over. In 1968, the moshav Ḥeleẓ had 510 inhabitants. Its economy was based on intensive field crops, vegetables, citrus, and dairy farming. The name Ḥeleẓ – connected with the Hebrew root meaning "to extricate" or "to pioneer" – was regarded as similar to that of the nearby abandoned Arab village Ḥulayqāt. After a drop in population, the moshav began to expand, its population rising from around 340 in the mid-1990s to 433 in 2002. (Efraim Orni / Shaked Gilboa (2nd ed.)