I'm currently writing a film proposal for a history class and can't quite find the dates of resettlement by Jewish families. There are good dates for the actual evacuation, but fewer for the time period of resettlement of those areas. I don't want to start a debate about right/wrong, property rights in refugee situations, it's just the dates might impact the narrative. So was it a matter of days? weeks? Months? Any help would be incredibly appreciated, thanks all.
First, your title is pretty broad. The area we're talking about is rather small, and Jaffa and Haifa are both large population centers which had huge numbers of Palestinian villages around that were depopulated during the war. So "near Haifa/Jaffa" covers a pretty substantial chunk of the conflict.
Anyway, it happened relatively quickly. The first settling in the now-empty apartments and houses occurred in 1948, and was largely complete by 1950. Israel experienced an absurd level of immigration in its early years. Besides causing economic hardship, there were intense housing pressures. Huge segments of the population were living in tent cities, so taking over Arab apartments and houses was done relatively quickly.
Jaffa specifically is a rather interesting case. The ministries of immigration and defense fought over who'd get the apartments, causing evictions and counter-evictions for months, through 1949. Haifa was settled with somewhat less anarchy. Cities in general (Tel-Aviv, J-lem, Haifa) were more messy, simply because there were a huge number of immigrants around without housing (or in the case of Jerusalem, Jews who'd been displaced by the fighting or evicted by Arab forces) who were hard to keep out.
If you're talking about villages, the situation was somewhat different. Many villages were simply destroyed. While some were settled during the same area, it was somewhat different. In some cases Israeli authorities actually had to forcibly move people in. Many of these lacked the infrastructure of the larger cities, and people only moved there because a tent city was the main alternative.
So generally the answer is within months of the end of the war, but the amount of time difference varied between a matter of weeks and a couple of years.
My source for this is Benny Morris' The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited. It has a chapter, "blocking the return", which focuses on the factors preventing Palestinians from returning, including discussion of Israeli settlement of Arab houses, apartments, and villages. It talks a lot specifically about Jaffa (because things were so chaotic) and discusses the situations in villages outside of urban areas.