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Massacres |
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The massacre of
Deir Yassin
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(Eye-witness testimonies and an interview with a retired member of
the Isreali Defense Force is found at the bottom of this page)
The first pivotal massacre in the 1948 War was the massacre of Deir
Yassin on April 9 and 10. It was designed to spread terror and panic
among the Palestinian population in every city and village of
Palestine in order to frighten them into fleeing, so that their
homes and land could be confiscated for the use of Jewish
colonialist settlers. The tactics of the Zionist Jews were to
frighten defenseless people into fleeing their homes out of fear for
their lives.
Two hundred and fifty people were slaughtered. Mutilating the
bodies, even before death, the culprits cut off parts and opened
bellies of others. Nursing babies were butchered on the bosoms of
helpless mothers.
Of those 250 people, 25 pregnant women were bayoneted in their
abdomens while still alive. Fifty-two children were maimed under the
eyes of their own mothers, and then they were slain and their heads
cut off. Their mothers were in turn massacred and their bodies
mutilated. About 60 other women and girls were also killed and their
bodies mutilated. Such are the historical facts concerning the
horrible crime perpetrated against the Arab village of Deir Yassin,
a suburb of Jerusalem.
Political scientists and historians who have written extensively on
the massacre conform to one version at Deir Yassin, though there
have been few authors who dispute the majority. For example, the
exact numbers of killed range between 100-250 but reports from the
United Nations and the Red Cross confirm that the figure was indeed
closer to the 250 estimate. Another point of contention concerns
whether or not women were raped, bayoneted, and paraded naked
through the streets. Dr. Hazem Nusseibeh, senior program assistant
at Palestine Broadcasting at the time, who witnessed the massacre
and its aftermath, says that women were bayoneted and about 11
children were made to parade naked through the streets of Jerusalem.
He doubts whether rape, as a matter of Israeli policy, occurred.
On the night of April 9, the peaceful Arab village of Deir Yassin
was awakened by loudspeakers urging inhabitants to evacuate the
village immediately. In a state of turmoil and fear, the villagers
proceeded to investigate what was going on, only to find themselves
surrounded on all sides by Jewish gangs. The Jews made use of the
prevailing state of fright and disorganization by killing and
mutilating people who were unable to defend themselves.
Mr. Walid Khalidi, author of Before Their Diaspora, said that one
month before the attack, Deir Yassin had asked for and signed a
non-aggression pact with Givat Sha’ul. Nevertheless, it was from
Givat Sha’ul that the Irgun attackers emerged, together with 40
armed men of the Stern Gang.
Dr. Nusseibeh says he remembers “the villagers fought bravely until
dawn.” Villagers were not completely unarmed-- as some accounts
claim. However, the villagers did not have a hidden arms cache
either. Those who had arms tried to defend themselves against their
Israeli aggressors, recalls Dr. Nusseibeh.
Mr. Nakhleh writes that the marauders gathered the women and girls
who were still alive, and after removing all their clothes, put them
in open cars, driving them naked through the streets of the Jewish
section of Jerusalem, where they were subjected to the mockery and
insult of the onlookers. Many took photographs of those women.
The crime of Deir Yassin shocked the world, which called upon the
International Red Cross Society to establish the truth. The
representative of the Red Cross, Mr. Jaques Reynier, asked the
Jewish Agency for permission to visit the site of the massacre. The
granting of this permission was delayed 24 hours while the Jews
tried to erase the traces of their crimes. They gathered together
all that was possible to collect all the parts of the mutilated
bodies of their victims, dumped them in the cistern of the village
and locked it up. They did all they could to obliterate any traces
that the representative of the Red Cross could come across.
On visiting the site of the crime, however, the representative of
the Red Cross discovered the cistern, and found 150 maimed bodies of
women and children. He could express his horror, disgust and fright
at the sight only by declaring that “the situation was horrible.”
In addition to the bodies that he found in the cistern, the
representative of the Red Cross discovered many other corpses
scattered throughout the back streets of the village and buried
under the debris of the destroyed homes. Mr. Reynier found under a
mound of dead bodies a girl of six who had been seriously wounded,
but was not yet dead. He extracted the girl from under the human
debris and carried her with him to the hospital.
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