Qira, Haifa

Qira (Arabic: قِيرة‎‎) was a Palestinian Arab village, located 23 kilometers southeast of Haifa. In Canaanite times, the town was known as Yokneam, and in Roman times as Cimona. Before its occupation by pre-state Israeli forces on 1 March 1948, it was locally referred to as Qira wa Qamun (Qamun being its neighbouring village).

According to Ilan Pappe in The Israel/Palestine Question (1999), the 140 tenant farmers of Qira wa Qamun evacuated the village in March on the "friendly advice" of the local Haganah intelligence officer at Yokneam, Yehuda Burstein. Benny Morris notes that Burnstein received the orders for the evacuation from Yosef Weitz. The Haganah Intelligence Report attributes the flight to "fear and the influence of attacks in the area," which Morris notes is "not really the same thing." Subsequent to the depopulation of the village, Weitz and his colleagues from the Jewish National Fund in the North, "decided to raze the tenants' houses, to destroy their crops, and to pay the evictees compensation."

Qira wa Qamun's inhabitants joined the first wave of the 1948 Palestinian exodus, displaced prior to the outbreak of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Today, the villagers and their descendants remain refugees.

At least 19 archaeological sites were located within the village's land area, the most renowned of these being Tell Qiri and Tell Qamun, the latter known in Hebrew as Tel Yokneam.

The Jewish localities of Yokneam, Yokneam Illit and kibbutz Hazorea were established on the former lands of Qira.