Before the Nakba, the village was located 18.5 kilometers southwest of Jerusalem, on the northern end of a valley that runs from north to south and then turns west. Its houses were located at this western bend in the valley, and on the northern side of a secondary road that extended east to Bethlehem. In the early Ottoman period, Khirbet at-Tannur was a sister village to Allar al-Fawqa (155125), and was called Allar al-Sufficient. In 1596, Allar al-Sufficient was a village in the Nahiya of Jerusalem (Liwa’ of Jerusalem), with a population of 39. It paid taxes on crops such as wheat, barley, and olives. The traveler Edward Robinson saw the village in 1838, when the ruins of a church were still visible. He reported that a village of the same name, Allar al-Tahta, had existed in the same area, with a population of 400 in 1875. However, the site appears to have been abandoned for a period of time after that. Khirbet at-Tannur was repopulated again during the Mandate period and is classified as a farm in the Indexed Gazetteer of Palestine. The occupation and ethnic cleansing of the village: although information about the village itself is unavailable, its location suggests that it was occupied in the context of Operation Hahar, carried out by the Zionist militias, and most likely fell around October 21-22, 1948.The village lands were annexed to the lands of the neighboring Allar and merged into them. There are two Zionist colonies on these lands, the closest to Khirbet at-Tannur, called Mat’a, which was built in 1950. Six houses were destroyed, and their rubble is scattered throughout the site. Four others remain standing. Almond, olive, and cypress trees grow at the northern end of the site. To the east, some eucalyptus trees grow around the remains of a stone house. A spring runs to the north of this ruined house.
