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Posted on JUNE-12-2000
TEL AVIV (R)-- An
Israeli historian said on Wednesday that he had uncovered credible
evidence that troops
massacred 200 Palestinians in a single village on the day Israel
came
into being in 1948.
Teddy Katz, who researched events in the village of Tantura for a
masters degree, said he
had spoken to witnesses including soldiers who were present to
support his findings.
"It started at night and was over in a few hours," Katz said of the
attack
on May 15, 1948. "From
testimonies and information I got from Jewish and Arab witnesses
and from soldiers who
were there, at least 200 people from the village of Tantura were
killed
by Israeli troops...
"From the numbers, this is definitely one of the biggest massacres,"
he
told Reuters. Katz said
14 Israeli soldiers were killed in the ambush on the village. The
man
who led the assault was
quoted as saying the villagers' deaths were a consequence of war
and that reports of a
massacre were "just stories." Katz said the attack was mentioned in
only a handful of
Palestinian history books and in the Israeli army archives. Tantura,
near
Haifa in northern
Israel, had 1,500 residents at the time. It was later demolished to
make
way for a parking lot
for a nearby beach and the Nahsholim kibbutz, or cooperative farm.
Worse than Deir Yassin
Katz said the killing
spree in Tantura was more tragic and bigger than in the village of
Deir
Yassin just west of
Jerusalem, where more than 100 Palestinian civilians were massacred
on April 9, 1948, in an
assault by Jewish armed groups. Reports just after the Deir Yassin
killings spoke of some
240 deaths though Israeli and Palestinian historians now accept
that the number of
fatalities was probably no more than 120. Deir Yassin has long stood
as
the defining symbol of
what Palestinians call Al Nakba (The Great Catastrophe). They use
the term to refer to
their dispossession and exile when up to 700,000 Palestinians fled
from their towns and
villages or were driven out by Jewish troops in the conflict between
Arab and Jew that
surrounded Israel's creation. Fawzi Tanji, now 73 and a refugee at a
camp in the West Bank,
is from Tantura and worked until May 1948 as a guard for the army
in British Mandate
Palestine. He told Reuters he had watched as Israeli troops took
over
the village, lined men
up against a cemetery wall and shot them. Katz said 95 men were
killed at the cemetery.
"I was 21 years old then. They took a group of 10 men, lined
them up against the
cemetery wall and killed them. Then they brought another
group, killed them,
threw away the bodies and so on," Tanji said. "I was waiting for
my turn to die in cold
blood as I saw the men drop in front of me." Tanji said the
killing stopped when a
Jew from the nearby settlement of Zichron Yaacov arrived
at the scene, took out a
pistol and threatened to shoot himself unless the soldiers
stopped the executions.
Katz said other Palestinians were killed inside their homes
and in other parts of
the village. At one point, he said, soldiers shot at anything that
moved. Villagers
resisted with the few guns they had, but they were soon taken
over. The Israeli
newspaper Maariv, which reported Katz's findings on Wednesday,
quoted the commander of
the Tantura attack as saying his troops had no grounds
to ask questions or
spare lives.
"It was war...When you
see the enemy opposite you, he doesn't have a note saying
he doesn't mean to
shoot you. When you see him, you shoot him," retired colonel
Bentz Pridan said.
"That's how we went, from street to street, and that explains why
a lot of people were
killed," he told Maariv.
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