Central District (Israel)

The Ramla subdistrict is one of Israel's subdistricts in the Central District. There are three principal cities in the subdistrict: Ramla, Lod, and Modi'in-Maccabim-Re'ut.

The White Mosque (Arabic: المسجد الأبيض, romanized: al-Masjid al-Abyad; Hebrew: המסגד הלבן, romanized: HaMisgad HaLavan) is an Umayyad-era mosque located in Ramla, Israel. Only its minaret is still standing. According to local Islamic tradition, the northwestern section of the mosque contained the shrine of an Islamic prophet, Saleh.The minaret is also known as the Tower of the Forty Martyrs. Islamic tradition dating back to 1467 claims that forty companions of the Islamic prophet Muhammad were buried at the mosque, which influenced an erroneous Western Christian tradition from the 16th century that the White Mosque was originally a church dedicated to the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste.

Ramla or Ramle (Hebrew: רַמְלָה, Ramle; Arabic: الرملة, ar-Ramleh) is a city in the Central District of Israel. The city was founded in the early 8th century CE by the Umayyad prince Sulayman ibn Abd al-Malik as the capital of Jund Filastin, the district he governed in Bilad al-Sham before becoming caliph in 715. The city's strategic and economic value derived from its location at the intersection of the Via Maris, connecting Cairo with Damascus, and the road connecting the Mediterranean port of Jaffa with Jerusalem. It rapidly overshadowed the adjacent city of Lydda, whose inhabitants were relocated to the new city. Not long after its establishment, Ramla developed as the commercial centre of Palestine, serving as a hub for pottery, dyeing, weaving, and olive oil, and as the home of numerous Muslim scholars. Its prosperity was lauded by geographers in the 10th–11th centuries, when the city was ruled by the Fatimids and Seljuks. It lost its role as a provincial capital shortly before the arrival of the First Crusaders (c. 1099), after which it became the scene of various battles between the Crusaders and Fatimids in the first years of the 12th century. Later that century, it became the centre of a lordship in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, a Crusader state established by Godfrey of Bouillon. Ramla had an Arab-majority population before most were expelled or fled during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. The town was subsequently repopulated by Jewish immigrants. As of 2019, Ramla is one of Israel's mixed cities, with a population 76% Jewish and 24% Arab (see Arab citizens of Israel). In recent decades, attempts have been made to develop and beautify the city, which has been plagued by neglect, financial problems and a negative public image. New shopping malls and public parks have been built, and a municipal museum was opened in 2001.

Ramla Municipal Stadium (Hebrew: אצטדיון עירוני רמלה, Itztadion Ironi Ramla), officially known as Toto Stadium Ramla, is a football stadium in Ramla, Israel. It is currently the home stadium of Beitar Tel Aviv Ramla and of the U-19 team of Maccabi Tel Aviv.The stadium was renovated ahead of the 2015 UEFA Women's Under-19 Championship, in which the stadium hosted 3 matches.

Dahmash (Arabic: دهمش, Hebrew: דהמש) is an Arab village in Israel situated 15 kilometers from Tel Aviv-Yafo in an agricultural area between Lod, Ramla and Nir Tzvi. It has been inhabited since 1951, and has a population of 600 people, all Arab citizens of Israel, living in approximately 70 homes. Almost all of the houses were built since the late 1990s. The village is unrecognized by the Israeli authorities.

The Third Battle of Ramla (or Ramleh) took place on 27 August 1105 between the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Fatimids of Egypt. The town of Ramla lay on the road from Jerusalem to Ascalon, the latter of which was the largest Fatimid fortress in Palestine. From Ascalon the Fatimid vizier, Al-Afdal Shahanshah, launched almost annual attacks into the newly founded Crusader kingdom from 1099 to 1107. Of the three battles the Crusaders fought at Ramla early in the twelfth century, the third was the most bloody. Egyptian armies of the period relied on masses of Sudanese bowmen supported by Arab and Berber cavalry. Since the archers were on foot and the horsemen awaited attack with lance and sword, an Egyptian army provided exactly the sort of immobile target that the Frankish heavy cavalry excelled in attacking. Whereas the Crusaders developed a healthy respect for the harass and surround tactics of the Turkish horse archers, they tended to discount the effectiveness of the Egyptian armies. While overconfidence led to a Crusader disaster at the second battle of Ramla, the more frequent result was a Fatimid defeat. "The Franks never, until the reign of Saladin, feared the Egyptian as they did the armies from Muslim Syria and Mesopotamia."As at Ramla in 1101, in 1105 the Crusaders had both cavalry and infantry under the leadership of Baldwin I. At the third battle, however, the Egyptians were reinforced by a Seljuk Turkish force from Damascus, including mounted archery, the great menace of the Crusaders. After they withstood the initial Frankish cavalry charge the battle raged for most of the day. Although Baldwin was once again able to drive the Egyptians from the field of battle and loot the enemy camp he was unable to pursue them any further: "the Franks appear to have owed their victory to the activity of Baldwin. He vanquished the Turks when they were becoming a serious threat to his rear, and returned to the main battle to lead the decisive charge which defeated the Egyptians." Despite the victory the Egyptians continued to make annual raids into the Kingdom of Jeruselum with some reaching the walls of Jerusalem itself before being pushed back. The next major engagement between Fatimids and Crusaders was the Battle of Yibneh in 1123.

The First Battle of Ramla (or Ramleh) took place on 7 September 1101 between the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Fatimids of Egypt. The town of Ramla lay on the road from Jerusalem to Ascalon, the latter of which was the largest Fatimid fortress in Palestine. From Ascalon the Fatimid vizier, Al-Afdal Shahanshah, launched almost annual attacks into the newly founded Crusader kingdom from 1099 to 1107. It was thrice the case that the two armies met each other at Ramla.

The Second Battle of Ramla (or Ramleh) took place on 17 May 1102 between the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Fatimids of Egypt.

Ramla railway station is a railway station in Ramla, Israel, on the Tel Aviv–Beit Shemesh–Jerusalem line. The station is located in the east of Ramla. The station is also on a section shared with the Be'er Sheva–Tel Aviv line, which branches out in a southerly direction about 3 km east of Ramla.

The Ramla Museum (Hebrew: מוזיאון רמלה) is a museum in Ramla, Central District, Israel.

The Great Mosque of Ramla (Hebrew: המסגד הגדול ברמלה) is a mosque in Ramla, Central District, Israel.

The 1948 Palestinian exodus from Lydda and Ramle, also known as the Lydda Death March, was the expulsion of 50,000 to 70,000 Palestinian Arabs when Israeli troops captured the towns in July that year. The military action occurred within the context of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. The two Arab towns, lying outside the area designated for a Jewish state in the UN Partition Plan of 1947, and inside the area set aside for an Arab state in Palestine, subsequently were transformed into predominantly Jewish areas in the new State of Israel, known as Lod and Ramla.The exodus, constituting "the biggest expulsion of the war", took place at the end of a truce period, when fighting resumed, prompting Israel to try to improve its control over the Jerusalem road and its coastal route which were under pressure from the Jordanian Arab Legion, Egyptian and Palestinian forces. From the Israeli perspective, the conquest of the towns, designed, according to Benny Morris, "to induce civilian panic and flight", averted an Arab threat to Tel Aviv, thwarted an Arab Legion advance by clogging the roads with refugees – the Yiftah Brigade was ordered to strip them of "every watch, piece of jewelry, or money, or valuables" – to force the Arab Legion to assume an additional logistical burden with the arrival of masses of indigent refugees that would undermine its military capacities, and helped demoralise nearby Arab cities. On 10 July, Glubb Pasha ordered the defending Arab Legion troops to "make arrangements ... for a phony war". The next day, Ramle surrendered immediately, but the conquest of Lydda took longer and led to an unknown number of deaths; the Palestinian historian Aref al-Aref, the only scholar who tried to draw up a balance sheet for the Palestinian losses, estimated 426 Palestinians died in Lydda on 12 July, of which 176 in the mosque and 800 overall in the fighting. Israeli historian Benny Morris suggests up to 450 Palestinians and 9–10 Israeli soldiers died.Once the Israelis were in control of the towns, an expulsion order signed by Yitzhak Rabin was issued to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) stating, "1. The inhabitants of Lydda must be expelled quickly without attention to age....". Ramle's residents were bussed out, while the people of Lydda were forced to walk miles during a summer heat wave to the Arab front lines, where the Arab Legion, Transjordan's British-led army, tried to provide shelter and supplies. A number of the refugees died during the exodus from exhaustion and dehydration, with estimates ranging from a handful to a figure of 500.The events in Lydda and Ramle accounted for one-tenth of the overall Arab exodus from Palestine, known in the Arab world as al-Nakba ('the catastrophe'). Some scholars, including Ilan Pappé, have characterised what occurred at Lydda and Ramle as ethnic cleansing. Many Jews who came to Israel between 1948 and 1951 settled in the refugees' empty homes, both because of a housing shortage and as a matter of policy to prevent former residents from reclaiming them. Ari Shavit noted that the "events were crucial phase of the Zionist revolution, and they laid the foundation for the Jewish state."