Kharas does not appear in records from the 16th century.[4] Oral tradition suggests that Kharas was founded after the 16th century.[5]Fellahin from Halhul established the settlement in the late 18th or early 19th century. A family from Sa'ir also relocated there due to conflicts in their hometown.[4]
Socin found from an official Ottoman village list from about 1870 that Charas had 38 houses and a population of 120, though the population count included men, only.[8]Hartmann found that Charas had 40 houses.[9]
In 1883, the PEF's Survey of Western Palestine described Kharas as "a small village standing high on the side of one of the lower hills, with olives round it. On the east is a well."[10]C.R. Conder of the PEF thought that the neighboring "thickets" or woodlands of Kharas may have been the "forest of Hereth" described in 1 Samuel 22:5, and where the fugitive king of Israel, David, hid himself from King Saul.[11]
In the 1945 statistics the population of Kharas was 970 Muslims,[14] and the land area 6,781 dunams of land according to an official land and population survey.[15] 615 dunams were plantations and irrigable land, 3,532 for cereals,[16] while 38 dunams were built-up (urban) land.[17]
Israel has confiscated approximately 2,000 dunums of the village land, half of which was used for the construction of the separation wall. After completion of the wall, 600 dunums of village land will be on the Israeli side of the wall (in the Seam Zone), isolated from the village.[19]
There are five schools in the town: a boy's secondary school, a girls' secondary school, Khaled ibn al-Walid basic mixed primary school, a girls' primary school and a mixed gender high school. There are four mosques, a sports club, a government-run health clinic and an olive press (olive oil manufacturing is a major industry in the town).[20]
^ abGrossman, D. (1986). "Oscillations in the Rural Settlement of Samaria and Judaea in the Ottoman Period". in Shomron studies. Dar, S., Safrai, S., (eds). Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishing House. p. 368
^Grossman, D. "The expansion of the settlement frontier of Hebron's western and southern fringes". Geography Research Forum, 5, 1982, p. 62.
