Икрит: Археологиялық ескерткіштер мен тарихы

The Canaanites erected a statue for the god Melqart of Tyre in the village. The village area contains mosaic floors, remains of a wine press, rock hewn tombs, cisterns, and granite implements. There are many archaeological sites in Iqrit's vicinity. Iqrit is identified with Yoqeret or Yokereth a Jewish village mentioned in the Talmud, homeplace of Jose of Yokereth (Babylonian Talmud, Ta'anit, 23b).

When the Crusaders occupied Iqrit, they called it Acref. Açref is a name still commonly used for the village among surrounding Bedouin tribes.

Incorporated into the Ottoman Empire in 1517 with all of Palestine, Iqrit appeared in the 1596 tax registers as being in the nahiya (subdistrict) of Akka under the Liwa of Safad, with a population of 374 and an economy dependent largely on goats, beehives and agriculture. There was a press used for olives or grapes. In 1875, Victor Guérin passed by the village and was told that it was "very considerable" and inhabited by Maronites and Greeks Orthodox. In 1881, the Palestine Exploration Fund's (PEF) Survey of Western Palestine (SWP) called it Akrith, and described it as a village of stone buildings situated on a tell, with arable land including figs and olives, a modern chapel serving a Christian population of 100, and water supplied by three springs and a dozen rock cut cisterns.

Like a number of other villages in the area, Iqrit was linked to the coastal highway from Acre to Ras an Naqura via a secondary road leading to Tarbikha. There were 339 people living in 50 houses in the census of 1931, which rose to 490 by the 1945 statistics, comprising 460 Christians and 30 Muslims. while 68 dunams were built up (urban) land. At the time of their eviction in November 1948, there were 491 citizens in Iqrit, including 432 Melkites (Greek Catholics), inhabiting the entire area of the village. Some of the 59 Muslims of the village rented their homes in Iqrit while others had built houses in esh Shafaya. Only part of the village land was cultivated and the rest was covered with oak, laurel and carob trees. By 1948, the village owned about 600 dunams (600,000 m²) of private property with groves of fig trees that served all inhabitants of Iqrit and the surroundings. The groves covered the hill of al Bayad, and the remaining cultivated land was used for crops of lentils, as well as tobacco and other fruit trees. The village included a private elementary school administered by the Greek Catholic Archdiocese and a large Melkite (Greek Catholic) church, the latter of which remains standing. There were two natural water springs, and many wells and a large pool for collected rainwater. There were many threshing floors, mainly located between the built up village lands and the cemetery.

Iqrit was captured on 31 October 1948 by the Haganah's Oded Brigade during Operation Hiram, an Israeli offensive which advanced on the coastal road towards Lebanon. Iqrit and Tarbikha surrendered and the villagers stayed in their homes. Iqrit and a number of other villages in the region were soon affected by a policy known as "an Arabless border strip". While some of the former inhabitants of Iqrit became refugees in Lebanon, most are now internally displaced Palestinians who are also citizens of Israel.

The first legal action against the state of Israel was brought in 1951 by 5 men of Iqrit. Muhammad Nimr al Hawari, acting as their lawyer, was instrumental in gaining the right of return for the men. On 31 July 1951, the Israeli courts recognised the rights of the villagers to their land and their right to return to it. The court said the land was not abandoned and therefore could not be placed under the Custodian of Absentee Property. In July 1951, the villagers of Iqrit pleaded their case before Israel's Supreme Court, and the court ruled in favour of the right to return to their village. After this judgement, the military government found another justification to prevent their return. The villagers appealed to the Supreme Court again and were scheduled to have their case considered on 6 February 1952.

In its third verdict, in February 1952, the court blamed the villagers for depending on promises from the military ruler of Galilee, instead of benefiting from the legal remedy which was given to them by the court in its first relevant verdict.

In the 1970s, villagers from Iqrit conducted a series of sit ins in the village's former church over a period of six years, and the case of Iqrit (and of Kafr Bir'im) was frequently covered by the Israeli media. Several prominent Israeli cultural and artistic figures supported the movement to repatriate the Iqrit villagers and public empathy for their plight was widespread. While the Israeli authorities recognized the villagers' right to return in principle, officials resisted implementing this right. In 1972, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir stated: It is not only consideration of security [that prevents] an official decision regarding Bi'rim and Iqrit, but the desire to avoid [setting] a precedent. We cannot allow ourselves to become more and more entangled and to reach a point from which we are unable to extricate ourselves. Meron Benvenisti noted in 2000 how it has been argued that the villagers of Iqrit and Bi'rim are not the only present absentees in Israel, and therefore recognizing their right of return is perceived as setting a "dangerous precedent" that would be followed by similar demands from other displaced persons. In 2003, some of Iqrit's villagers repetitioned the Supreme Court so as to facilitate their return to Iqrit, but the petition was rejected by the court.

The operational name of the Munich massacre of Israeli athletes in 1972 was named by its perpetrators, the Black September Organization, "Iqrit and Bir'im", after the two Galilean villages.

On 26 December 2023, during the Israel–Hamas war, an anti tank missile shot by Hizbollah fighters from Lebanon damaged a shed in the Iqrit church compound, but not the church itself. The civilian man in his 80s who was guarding the church suffered moderate wounds.

Following the war, the area was incorporated into the State of Israel and a number of new Jewish villages were established there, two of them partially on Iqrit's land: Shomera (1949; built mainly on the ruins of Tarbikha), and Even Menachem (1960). Gornot HaGalil (1980) followed nearby. At the western entrance of Iqrit, there is now a cowshed that belongs to the moshav of Shomera.

The Melkite Greek Catholic church is the only building of Iqrit which remains standing. The fenced cemetery is annually maintained, on the road to the north. Uncleared rubble from the destroyed houses remains and there are overgrown fig, grape, almond, and olive orchards.