Musmus

Musmus (, / ) is an Arab village in Haifa District. The village is located in the Wadi Ara area of the northern Triangle, northeast of Umm al-Fahm. Since 1996, it has been under the jurisdiction of the Ma'ale Iron local council. The village is divided into five neighborhoods: Abu Shehab, Ighbarieh, Southeast, Mahagna, and Sharqawi. In mid-2016, Musmus' population was 4,215, all of whom were Muslim. Most of the villagers belong to the Ighbarieh and Mahagna clans. The village is the birthplace of the Palestinian poet Rashid Hussein. Highway 65 passes through the village and splits it into two parts.

==History== There are several theories for the origin of the village's name; some say it is a distortion of the name of the Pharaoh Thutmose II who conquered the land, others say that the name is that of an Egyptian village. According to a local Arab tradition, a trade caravan passed in the area and saw a man dying of thirst. They handed him a bottle of water and told him "mus, mus" ("suck" in Arabic) and saved his life. The man decided to remain in the place and build his home there and call it Musmus, and around his home the village developed. E. H. Palmer thought Musmus came from a personal name, meaning "compactly built", while Edward Robinson gave the name as Mushmush, meaning apricot.