Did Israel murder the Palestine people in Tantura in 1948 ?
Yes, Zionist forces most certainly did commit a massacre, looting occured and Palestinian women were raped there. There is no question about it, the Tantura massacre happened and is real. Let’s get right into the historical facts.
Introduction:
Tantura was an ancient Palestinian Arab fishing village located 8 kilometers (5 mi) northwest of the Jewish colony of Zikhron Ya'akov on the Mediterranean coast of Palestine. Near the village lie the ruins of the ancient Canaanite city of Dor also known as Tell el-Burj, or Khirbet el-Burj.
The Palestinian coastal village of Tantura photographed sometime between 1920 and 1933, prior to the village’s destruction. (Matson Collection).
The village stood on a low limestone hill overlooking the shoreline of two small bays. The water was supplied from a well in the eastern part of the village. The al-Bab gate was in the southeast of the village. The Roman ruins were on the coast to the north with the hill of Umm Rashid to the south. Tantura had a population of around 1,500 whose livelihood depended on agriculture, fishing and menial jobs in nearby Haifa.
Tantura was one of the largest of the coastal villages and for the invading brigade it stuck like 'a bone in the throat', as the official Alexandroni war book puts it. Tantura's day came on 22 May.
The village was targeted in the early stages of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, with its houses looted, its Palestinian inhabitants massacred, women raped, and its people ethnically cleansed by the Palmach underground Alexandroni Brigade. The Tantura massacre was first documented by a Palestinian politician in 1951, decades before a 2022 Israeli documentary revealed testimony from several IDF veterans affirming that a massacre, involving at least 200 Palestinian victims, had taken place at that time.
In 1948, al-Tantura was within the area designated by the UN in the controversial Partition Plan for the Jewish State. Some of the inhabitants were civil servants, working as policemen, customs officials and clerks at the Haifa Magistrates court. A paved road led to the Haifa Highway. The village was one of the most developed in the region. Some residents of Tantura had been involved in the Palestinian armed revolt against the British, and three were killed in a skirmish with the British near the village.
On May 9, 1948, the Haganah leadership decided to "expel or subdue" the villages of Kafr Saba, al-Tira, Qaqun, Qalansuwa and Tantura. On May 11, David Ben-Gurion advised the Haganah to "focus on its primary task", which according to the Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe, was the bi'ur (lit. cleansing) of Palestine.
As part of Plan Dalet, formulated in March 1948, ahead of the 14 May 1948 Israeli Declaration of ‘Independence’, the Haganah assigned the Alexandroni Brigade for the "occupation of al-Tantura and al-Furaydis".
The massacre:
On 15 May 1948, a small group of Tantura's notables, including the mukhtar of the village, met the Jewish intelligence officers, who offered them terms of surrender. Suspecting that surrender would lead to the villagers' expulsion, they rejected the offer.
A week later, on 22 May 1948, the village was attacked at night by the 33rd Battalion of the Alexandroni Brigade. At first, the Jewish commander in charge wanted to send a van into the village with a loud speaker calling upon people to capitulate, but this scheme was not carried out.
The offensive came from all four flanks. This was uncommon; the brigade usually closed in on villages from three flanks, tactically creating an 'open gate' on the fourth flank through which they could drive the people out. Lack of coordination meant that the Jewish troops had fully encircled the village and consequently found themselves with a very large number of villagers on their hands.
Tantura's captured villagers were herded at gunpoint down to the beach. The Jewish troops then separated the men from the women and children, and expelled the latter to nearby Furaydis, where some of the men joined them a year and half later. Meanwhile, the hundreds of men collected on the beach were ordered to sit down and await the arrival of an Israeli intelligence officer, Shimshon Mashvitz, who lived in the nearby colonial settlement of Givat Ada and in whose 'district' the village fell.
Tantura residents ethnically cleansed out of their village, May 1948. Dozens of others have been killed. Credit: Benno Rothenberg / Meitar Collection, Pritzker Family National Photography Collection, National Library of Israel.
Palestinians from Tantura are expelled to Jordan, watched by members of the UN and the Red Cross, June 1948. (Benno Rothenberg/Meitar Collection/National Library of Israel/The Pritzker Family National Photography Collection/CC BY 4.0).
Mashvitz went along with a local collaborator, hooded as at Ayn al-Zaytun, and picked out individual men- again, in the eyes of the Israeli army, 'men' were all males between the ages of ten and fifty- and took them out in small groups to a spot further away where they were executed. The men were selected according to a pre-prepared list drawn from Tantura's village file, and included everybody who had participated in the 1936 Revolt, in attacks on Jewish traffic, who had contacts with the Mufti, and anyone else who had 'committed' one of the 'crimes' that automatically condemned them.
These were not the only men executed. Before the selection and killing process took place on the coast, the occupying unit had gone on a killing spree inside the houses and in the streets. Joel Skolnik, a sapper in the battalion, had been wounded in this attack, but after his hospitalisation heard from other soldiers that this had been 'one of the most shameful battles the Israeli army had fought.' According to him, sniper shots from within the village as the soldiers entered had caused the Jewish troops to run amok soon after the village was taken and before the scenes on the beach unfolded. The attack happened after the villagers had signaled their surrender by waving a white flag.
Solnik heard that two soldiers in particular had been doing the killing, and that they would have gone on had not some people from the nearby Jewish colonial settlement of Zikhron Yaacov arrived and stopped them. It was the head of the Zikhron Yaacov settlement, Yaacov Epstein, who managed to call a halt to the orgy of killing in Tantura, but 'he came too late', as one survivor commented bitterly.
Most of the killing was done in cold blood on the beach. Some of the victims were first interrogated and asked about a 'huge cache' of weapons that had supposedly been hidden somewhere in the village. As they couldn't tell- there was no such stack of weapons- they were shot dead on the spot. Today, many of the survivors of these horrific events live in the Yarmuk refugee camp in Syria, coping only with great difficulty with life after the trauma of witnessing the executions.
This is how a Jewish officer described the executions at Tantura:
Prisoners were led in groups to a distance of 200 metres aside and there they were shot. Soldiers would come to the commander-in-chief and say, 'My cousin was killed in the war.' His commander heard that and instructed the troops to take a group of five to seven people aside and execute them. Then a soldier came and said his brother had died in one of the battles. For one brother the retribution was higher. The commander ordered the troops to take a larger group and they were shot, and so on.
In other words, what took place in Tantura was the systematic execution of able-bodied young men by Jewish soldiers and intelligence officers. One eye witness, Abu Mashaykh, was staying in Tantura with a friend, as he originally came from Qisarya, the village Jewish troops had already destroyed and expelled in February 1948. He saw with his own eyes the execution of eighty-five young men of Tantura, who were taken in groups often and then executed in the cemetery and the nearby mosque. He thought even more were executed, and estimated that the total number could have been 110. He saw Shimshon Mashvitz supervising the whole operation:
'He had a "Sten" [sub-machine gun] and killed them.'
Later he adds:
'They stood next to the wall, all facing the wall. He came from the back and shot them in the head, all of them.'
He further testified how Jewish soldiers were watching the executions with apparent relish.
Fawzi Muhammad Tanj, Abu Khalid, also witnessed the executions. In the account he gives the village men were separated from the women, and then groups of seven to ten were taken and executed. He witnessed the killing of ninety people.
Mahmud Abu Salih of Tantura also reported the killing of ninety people. He was seventeen at the time and his most vivid memory is the killing of a father in front of his children. Abu Salih kept in touch with one of the sons, who went out of his mind seeing his father executed and never recovered.Abu Salih saw the execution of seven male members of his own family.
Mustafa Abu Masri, known as Abu Jamil, was thirteen at the time, but was probably mistaken for being around ten during the selection and thus was sent to the group of women and children, which saved him. A dozen members of his family, aged between ten and thirty, were less fortunate and he witnessed them being shot. The sequence of events he relates makes for chilling reading. His father ran into a Jewish officer whom the family knew and trusted, and so he sent his family away with that officer: he himself was later shot. Abu jamil recalled 125 people being killed in summary executions. He saw Shimson Mashvitz walking among the people who had been collected on the beach, carrying a whip, lashing out at them 'just for the fun of it' Anis Ali Jarban told similar horror stories about Mashvitz. He came from the nearby village of Jisr al-Zarqa and had fled with his family to Tantura, thinking the larger village would be safer.
When the rampage in the village was over and the executions had come to an end, two Palestinians were ordered to dig mass graves under the supervision of Mordechai Sokoler, of Zikhron Yaacov, who owned the tractors that had been brought in for the gruesome job. In 1999, he said he remembered burying 230 bodies; the exact number was clear in his mind: 'I lay then one by one in the grave.'
Several more Palestinians who took part in the digging of the mass graves told of the horrific moment when they realised they were about to be killed themselves. They were only saved because Yaacov Epstein, who had intervened in the frenzy of violence in the village, arrived and also stopped the killing on the beach. Abu Fihmi, one of the eldest and most respected members of the village, was one of those recruited to first identify the bodies and then help carry them to the graves: Shimon Mashvitz ordered him to list the bodies, and he counted ninety-five. Jamila Ihsan Shura Khalil saw how these bodies were then put on carts and pushed by the villagers to the burial place.
Teddy Katz’s research confirmed Palestinian accounts that the massacre occurred in two stages. After village leaders waved a white flag following clashes that left a handful of Palestinians and Israelis dead, the soldiers went on a killing spree, entering homes and executing anyone they found. The rampage left an estimated 100 villagers dead.
The rest were rounded up, with fighting-age men separated from the elderly, women and children. The men were led to the beach, where they were interrogated and another 100 or so — aged between 13 and 30 — executed.
According to the testimonies of a large number of witnesses, the methods of execution included shooting people who were lined up against walls, shooting with a submachine gun into pens where people had been gathered, shooting people in the head from point-blank range with a Parabellum pistol, throwing grenades into a house with civilians inside, burning people alive (including one woman) with a flamethrower. We also know of cases where people were ordered to dig their own graves.
We also have testimony that people were sent to their deaths after being interrogated by the intelligence service of the Haganah. Also, according to eyewitnesses, there were detailed lists of weapons holders in Tantura, and those who kept weapons in their houses were shot after handing them over to the soldiers.
There are also testimonies providing the names of some of the murderers, including a young officer who was later a senior official in the IDF and in the Israeli civil service. Every Zionist who was there knew what happened and kept quiet about it.
There are reports of looting and Palestinian women being raped by the Zionist forces in Tantura.
After the massacre, women and children were transported to Furaydis. Male survivors were placed into prison and labour camps, later being forced to leave their homes, and properties through prisoner exchanges followed by their families. On May 31, 1948, Bechor Shitrit, Minister of Minority Affairs of the Provisional government of Israel, sought permission to expel Tantura’s women and children who reside at Furaydis. Haganah intelligence also pressured Ben-Gurion to expel them and on 18 June, most of the Tantura women and children were ethnically cleansed.
The women and children of Tantura. Credit: Leah Osherov.
Some testimonies:
Muhammad Abu Hana, born in 1936, who was child at the time of the events in Tantura and lived as a displaced person in the Yarmouk refugee camp, recounted:
"We were awakened in the middle of the night by heavy gunfire. The women began to scream and ran out of the houses carrying their children, and they gathered in several places in the village.
I also left the house during the fighting and went around the streets trying to see what was going on. Suddenly a woman shouted to me, "Your uncle is wounded! Quick, bring some alcohol!" I saw my uncle with a wound in his shoulder and the blood gushing out like a fountain. Because I was young, I didn't know fear. I grabbed an empty bottle and ran to the clinic. The nurse, a Christian from the village named Zahabiyya, filled the bottle with rubbing alcohol and I ran back to my uncle. The women cleaned the wound and took my uncle to our house, where they hid him from the Israelis in the grain attic.
But the soldiers saw the trail of blood and soon burst in, asking my grandfather where my uncle was. My grandfather said he didn't know. They left but came back several times with the same question. At some point my uncle, who was in pain, asked for a cigarette, and my grandmother gave him one. When the soldiers came back again, the smell of burning tobacco clinched the matter. They grabbed him and took him away. On their way out they insulted my grandfather, shouting that he was a liar, and he answered back that he had only tried to defend his son, as anyone would.
My uncle survived thanks to the intervention of the mukhtar of Zichron Yaacov. He had good relations with my grandfather, who was the mukhtar of Tantura.
By morning, the shooting had stopped and the attackers rounded everyone up on the beach. They sorted them out, the women and children on one side, the men on the other. They searched the men and ordered them to keep their hands above their heads. Female soldiers searched the women and took all their jewelry, which they put in a soldier's helmet. They didn't give the jewelry back when they expelled us toward Furaydis. During the entire operation, military boats were offshore.
On the beach, the soldiers led groups of men away, and you could hear gunfire after each departure.
Toward noon we were led on foot to an orchard to the east of the village, and I saw bodies piled on a cart pulled by men of Tantura who emptied their cargo in a big pit. Then trucks arrived, and women and children were loaded onto them and driven to Furaydis. On the road, near the railroad tracks, other bodies were scattered about.’’
Muhammad Kamil al-Dassuki, born in 1935, resident of Raml camp, Lattakieh, reported:
People were screaming: "The Jews are attacking, the Jews are attacking!" Bullets were whistling all around, and you could hear explosions in the village. At dawn, I saw boats unloading soldiers near al-Burj, north of the village, and they advanced toward the various entrances of Tantura.
While we were carrying the dead, a young man--it was Mustafa al-Salbud--started to weep. A soldier asked him what was the matter. He replied, "My two brothers have been killed. Here's the body of my brother Khalil, and here is my brother Muhammad. My mother has no one but me now." "What use is your life then?" the soldier asked. And he shot him.
In the cemetery, I saw cars filled with Jews, some of them laughing and singing, but others were terribly silent.
Sabira Abu Hana, born in 1933, resident of Raml camp, Lattakieh, said:
We had spent the evening at our neighbor's, Umm Khalid, the wife of Sa`d al-Din Abu al-Hasan. We were preparing the charcoal fire to boil the laundry, because in the morning we had to help with the harvest. Nimr Frahat suddenly burst in and shouted, "What are you still doing here? The Jews are already at Talat Umm Rashid!" We ran toward the center of the village where my maternal uncle, Sa`id Salam, had his house. We stayed there until six in the morning. An hour later, we saw a Jew tie up a man from the village and take him away at gunpoint.
My grandfather, Mahmud Abu Hana, was shot in front of the entrance of the house. My paternal uncle, Fadl Abu Hana, was liquidated after the fall of the village and rolled in a straw mat. Amina `Awad Abu Idriss discovered the body of her brother near the cemetery. She smoothed his hair, kissed him, and yelled her grief. The bodies that I saw at the cemetery in the first lot were more than fifty. On our way there, I saw Abu Jawdat al-Samra carrying his dead son on a bier he had fashioned from a ladder.
Those who died after leaving Tantura were more than forty in number, most of them children. This was on the road between Furaydis and the towns of the West Bank, including Tulkarm and Khalil. Every hour you would hear that the child of so-and-so had died. I remember that in the village of the Russian monastery, we buried more than twenty bodies.
What happened to our village isn't less horrible than the massacre of Dayr Yasinbut by the time our village fell people were more preoccupied with the fate of the living and the loss of the country, and no one talked about the massacre of Tantura, until recently.
Eyewitnesses also reported the callous and humiliating way in which women were stripped of all their jewellery, to the very last item. The same women were then harassed physically by the soldiers, which in Tantura ended in rape. Here is how Najiah Ayyub described it:
'I saw that the troops who encircled us tried to touch the women but were rejected by them. When they saw that the women would not surrender, they stopped. When we were on the beach, they took two women and tried to undress them, claiming they had to search the bodies.'
Amina al-Masri (Umm Mustafa), born in 1925, resident of the Qabun quarter of Damascus reported:
From the time that the village of Kafr Lam was captured after the fall of Haifa, we began to fear an attack on Tantura. The night of the assault, men were on guard duty at the various entrances to the village, but they were poorly armed. I heard gunfire and thought it came from al-Bab [the gate], that is to say from southeast of the village. I woke up my husband. At first he thought I was dreaming, but the firing grew louder, and there were explosions and all. They came from the hill of Umm Rashid in the south and from the direction of al-Burj [the tower], on the coast to the north where the Roman ruins are located. We got the children out and hurried to the house of my parents. They were terrified. The shooting had died down a little and people thought that the battle was over. How naive we were! Abu Khalid `Abd al-`Al even believed that the Jewish attack had been countered, and cried out, "We won! We got them!" A few minutes later the gunfire resumed with a vengeance, accompanied by shelling. People began running in all directions shouting, "The Jews are inside the village! The Jews are in the village!"
In the morning, when they were leading us to the collection point on the beach, they killed Fadl Abu Hana at the place known as the Marah. Fadl was unarmed, but he wore a khaki jacket. Before our eyes, they took a group of men away and shot them all except for one. To him they said, "Go tell the others what you saw."
In their search for money and gold, they even went through the swaddling clothes of our infants, and when a little girl tarried in taking off an earring, a woman soldier ripped it off, and the little one began to bleed.
They then herded us to a piece of land that belonged to the Dassuki family. We had walked there barefoot over stones and brambles, and then they loaded us onto trucks which took us to Furaydis. There, my grandfather, Hajj Mahmud Abu Hana, sent one of his daughters to find him a shroud in `Ayn Ghazal or Ijzim, for he sensed that his hour had come. She couldn't find one in either place and returned empty-handed. But he had already drawn his last breath after having bowed to the ground twice and read verses of the Qur'an, calling on the Almighty not to let him die outside Palestine. We then found a coverlet, which we split open to remove the wool filling to make a shroud with the material and wrapped him in it for burial.
In Furaydis, a military vehicle driven by a female soldier purposely ran down a woman of Tantura, Amina Muhammad Abu `Umar, the wife of Falih al-Sa`bi, who had been returning from the field with a bundle of wheat on her head that she had gathered to feed her children. A woman who witnessed the scene rushed to pull the dead woman's body off the roadway. Another vehicle barrelled toward her. It missed her but ran over the dead woman a second time.
That day, I told myself that the End of Days had come and that none of us would survive these events.
We spent a month in Furaydis. A child was born there, the first child of Tantura born after the massacre. The family, the Abu Safiyyas, had lost most of their menfolk the day the village fell.
Yusra Abu Hana, born in 1915, resident of Yarmuk camp said:
The shooting began near midnight. Mudallala arrived from Zuluf. She told us, "Issa al-Dassuki is wounded, maybe dead. And when Su`ad al-Filu ran to him to give him something to drink, they fired at her and killed her."
One of my brothers, Fadl, also was killed; the other, Faysal, was wounded. He had hidden in the stable, but he was caught: he was smoking, and the smell of his cigarette gave him away. They wanted to kill him, but the mukhtar of Zichron Yaacov, who had good relations with my father, interceded for him. It should be remembered that we treated the people of his colony well when they came on the beach of Tantura.
Hasan al-`Ammuri was an only child and his mother had been forty-five years old when she gave birth to him. He took part in the fighting. They promised him his life if he surrendered, but they shot him the minute he gave them his weapon.
On the beach where we were assembled, they stripped us of everything: watches, bracelets, money, identity papers.On the way to the beach, the door of one of the houses was open, and I saw a pile of bodies inside. Not to mention the people they had gathered and executed in the cemetery. More than fifty. All the ones they killed had no weapons, shot down in the streets of the village or inside houses. On the beach, they led men away in groups, but no one came back. Toward noon, the killing ended when the mukhtar of Zichron Yaacov came with a written order. Some forty men who had just been led away thus were saved.
Worse still were the labour camps. The idea of using Palestinian prisoners as forced labour came from the Israeli military command and was endorsed by the politicians. Three special labour camps were built for the purpose, one in Sarafand, another in TeI-Litwinski (today Tel-Hashomer Hospital) and a third in Umm Khalid (near Netanya). The authorities used the prisoners in any job that could help strengthen both the Israeli economy and the army's capabilities. One survivor from Tantura, on his eventual release from such a camp, recalled what he had gone through in an interview with one of Haifa's former notables, Muhammad Nimr Al-Khatib, who, in 1951, published a book on those days under the title Min Athar al-Nakba (Consequences of the Catastrophe), a compendium of writings, including his own memoirs on Haifa and several eyewitness accounts by Palestinian refugees from various parts of the country. Khatib’s work, along with those of two other Arab authors, was translated into Hebrew in 1954 by the Israel Defense Forces, General Staff/History Branch, and published under the title Be’einei Oyev (In Enemy Eyes).
Muhammad Nimr Al-Khatib transcribed the following testimony:
The survivors of the Tantura massacre were imprisoned in a nearby pen; for three days without food, then pushed into lorries, ordered to sit in impossible space, but threatened with being shot. They did not shoot but clubbed them on the head, and blood gushed everywhere, finally taken to Umm Khalid (Netanya).
The witness then describes the routine of forced labour in the camp: working in the quarries and carrying heavy stones; living on one potato in the morning and half a dried fish at noon. There was no point in complaining as disobedience was punished with severe beatings. After fifteen days, 150 men were moved to a second camp in Jalil, where they were exposed to similar treatment:
'We had to remove rubble from destroyed Arab houses.' But then, one day,'an officer with good English told us that"from now on" we would be treated according to the Geneva Convention. And indeed, conditions improved.'
Five months later, al-Khatib's witness said, he was back at Umm Khalid where he recalled scenes that could have come straight from another place and time. When the guards discovered that twenty people had escaped,
'We, the people of Tantura, were put in a cage, oil was poured on our clothes and our blankets were taken away.'
Khatib also reports cases of Tantura female rape victims being treated in a Nablus hospital.
Adil Muhammad al-Ammuri, born in 1931, resident of Yarmuk camp, described what he witnessed in the Tantura massacre, the Um Khalid, and Jalil prison camps:
Lots of things happened before the attack on Tantura the night of 23 May 1948. I especially remember watching the train go by loaded with armored vehicles, supplies, and ammunition for the colonies of Khudeira, Ramat Gan, and Netanya. During the same period, armed men would fire at Tantura villagers working their fields. As`ad Abu Mdayriss was killed during one of those incidents.
The night of the attack, I was in our house at the center of the village. I tried to go to the southern part but was stopped by machine-gun fire. People were rushing about, old men and children, asking God to grant us victory. They weren't so much in a state of panic as confused, not knowing what to do and what was really happening.
During the earlier clashes, the villagers of the Haifa district had gone to the aid of the others. This time, we thanked God that the neighboring villagers didn't come, because they would have been cut down at the Israeli positions set up on all the roads leading to our village. Later I learned that the inhabitants of Jaba` and `Ayn Ghazal had tried to come to our aid but had been unable to reach the village.
When they rounded us up on the beach, the Jews asked us, "Are there any Syrians among you? Have you received Syrian help from the sea?"
Once we were captured, we were taken to the camp that had been set up in Umm Khalid. Later they transferred us to the Jalil prison camp, where a Red Cross representative registered our names and informed us of our rights as prisoners of war. The soldiers then made us harvest Arab fields on behalf of a Jewish army contractor. They paid us with coupons with which we could get food items at the canteen. This allowed us to satisfy our hunger, because our daily prison rations were woefully insufficient. One day, several buses arrived in the camp loaded with men. They were made to get down so they could drink at the camp's only water tank. Because they were parched with thirst, they were pushing and shoving to get to the tap. The soldiers opened fire on them and blood mixed with water. Tens of men fell dead before our eyes. It was only later that we learned that the men were from Lydda and Ramla.
When we left the camp for exile, we had to cover the distance between Wadi al-Milh and Jinin by foot. I saw numerous Arab corpses along the road.
Yusuf Salam, born in 1924, resident of Yarmuk camp said:
A week before the attack, my brother Mustafa and my cousin Muhammad, who were staying with some of our relatives at Kafr Lam, were killed by the Jews in an attack on the village. My father was wounded while trying to bring back their bodies.
I was awakened by the sound of bullets. I asked my aunt, who was staying with us to take care of my wounded father, what was happening. She said: "Don't worry, it's not very serious."
I saw them enter the village and even though a white flag had been hung from the minaret of the mosque, they killed every man who crossed their path.
While we were being held on the beach, and after they had selected a last group for execution, the mukhtar of Zichron Yaacov arrived and spoke to Samson and warned him against killing them. Samson replied that he had orders to kill the whole lot. Yaacov left and soon returned with a piece of paper and handed it to Samson. That's how this last group, which numbered about forty men, escaped death.
Besides the bodies that I saw in the mass grave that had been dug in the Dassukis' field, I myself counted twenty-five bodies of our people.
In Umm Khalid, the deserted village they had transformed into a prison camp, some people from Zichron Yaacov came one day and tried to convince the head of the camp, whose name was Ashkenazi, to treat us more kindly and with less insults and humiliation, but he refused to listen and made them leave.
While we were being kept at Umm Khalid, `Arif Salam and Muhammad al-Malah managed to escape, so they decided to punish us collectively. We were then transferred to Jalil. One day, a soldier started firing and killed a number of prisoners. Yusuf Abu `Ajjaj was one of the victims. Later we learned that the soldier wanted to avenge the Israeli losses at the battle of Tirat Bani Sa`b against the Iraqis.
Another time, the guards became very nervous. A group of Irgun wanted to occupy the camp to liquidate all the Arab prisoners. I remember hearing threatening words between the Haganah and the Irgun people at the entrance of the camp.
When I learned from my comrades that the Jews were taking prisoners to work outside the camp and that a number of them never came back, I resolved to escape. So one night I went near the bungalow of the Egyptian prisoners, because it was unlit. Three other prisoners had decided to flee with me: Anwar Farhat, Ahmad al-`Ammuri, and a man from the village of Yazur. We were counting a lot on the Yazuri because he knew his way around the area. Three rows of barbed wire surrounded the camp and my companions held back. I got through the first row without difficulty. My face and chest got cut up going through the others, but I plunged ahead until I got out. I had no idea about the region, and the weather was cold and wintery. I wandered aimlessly around for three days until I was stopped by soldiers who turned out to be Iraqi. A Palestinian was with them who knew my village and confirmed my account of what had happened. They took me to Tirat Bani Sa`b. When the villagers saw me coming, bleeding and accompanied by soldiers, they thought I was an Israeli prisoner captured by the Iraqis and tried to attack me, but an officer stopped them.
Life was not easy there, either. There wasn't enough food or bedding, and no clothing.
In March 1998, while a graduate student at the University of Haifa, Katz, a zionist himself, submitted a master’s thesis to the department of Middle Eastern history. Its title: “The Exodus of the Arabs from the Villages at the Foot of Southern Mount Carmel in 1948.” Katz, then in his fifties, received a grade of 97. According to custom, the paper was deposited in the university’s library, and the author intended to proceed to doctoral studies. But his plan went awry. In January 2000, journalist Amir Gilat borrowed the study from the library and published an article about the massacre in Maariv. It touched off a firestorm. Besides the libel suit initiated by the Alexandroni veterans association, the university also went into a tizzy, and decided to set up a committee to reexamine the M.A. thesis. Even though the original reviewers found that Katz had completed the thesis with excellence, and even though the paper was based on dozens of documented testimonies – of Jewish soldiers and Palestinian refugees from Tantura – the new committee decided to disqualify the thesis. All of this was an attempt to try to bury the truth once again.
In the resulting court case, after two days' cross-examination, Katz agreed to an out-of-court settlement that involved him signing a statement nullifying the conclusions of his research, namely that extrajudicial killings were committed after the surrender of the village. The next day at court, Judge Drora Pilpel announced the case closed. For Katz, one court hearing was all it took for him to sign a letter of apology in which he declared that there had not been a massacre in the village and that his thesis was flawed. The fact that just hours later he retracted this, and that his lawyer, Avigdor Feldman, was not present at the nighttime meeting in which Katz came under both economic pressure, family pressure and dire health (a recent stroke), was forgotten. Katz, attempted to rescind his statement, explaining that he had signed it in a "moment of weakness that he already deeply regretted", and that it "did not represent what he really felt about his work". After several further hours of deliberation, Judge Pilpel upheld the decision to close "based on her conviction that a contract between parties must be respected, though "she emphasized that her decision did not relate in any way to the content, accuracy or veracity of the libel suit". Katz subsequently appealed to the Supreme Court, which upheld the decision of the lower court for the same reasons. The apology buried the findings the thesis had uncovered, and the details of the massacre were thereafter not subjected to comprehensive scrutiny.
In the wake of this case, the University of Haifa suspended Katz's degree, which had originally received a grade of 97%, inviting him to revise his thesis. The paper was sent out to five examiners, whom failed it. Katz was subsequently awarded a "non-research" MA.
Katz's most senior interviewee was Shlomo Ambar, later a general in the IDF. Ambar refused to give him details of what he had seen, saying:
'I want to forget what happened there.'
When Katz pressed him, all he was willing to say was:
connect this to the fact that I went to fight the Germans [he had served vith the Jewish Brigade in the Second World War]. The Germans were the worst enemy the Jewish people has had, but when we fought, we fought according to the laws of war dictated by the international community. The Germans did not kill Prisoners of War, they killed Slav Prisoners of War, but not British, not even [when they were] Jewish.
Ambar admitted to hiding things:
'I did not talk then, why should I talk now?'
Understandable, given the images that came to his mind when Katz asked him what his comrades had done in Tantura.
Katz sums up the slaughter in his thesis:
“All of the men of Tantoura were taken to the cemetery of the village, and they put them in lines, and they ordered them to begin digging, and every line that finished digging just was shot and fell down to the holes. Which I guess reminds at least a few of you, something that had to do with Germans, three years after the end of the Second World War.”
The Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, then a professor at Haifa University, supported Katz and his thesis and has challenged the Israeli veterans to take him to court, saying he has evidence that the massacre occurred. In a 2001 article in the Journal of Palestine Studies titled ‘The Tantura Case in Israel: The Katz Research and Trial’. Pappé defended the use of oral history with reference to the USA. He pointed out that that history was obtained by Katz, not only from Palestinian villagers but also from Israeli soldiers. Pappé provided new evidence that had come to light after Katz had presented his thesis, in one case quoting (with reference to the IDF source file) "from a document from the Alexandroni Brigade to IDF headquarters in June notes: 'We have tended to the mass grave, and everything is in order'”, and in another, published testimonies by eyewitnesses who had been located in Syria. He also related the background to Katz's original signed repudiation of his thesis.
In Pappé’s article, he said:
As a faculty member of Haifa University, I posted on the university's internal Web site some of the more important transcripts of the more than sixty hours of Katz's tapes, most of which had not been referred to in court. They include horrific descriptions of execution, of the killing of fathers in front of children, of rape and torture. They come from both the Jewish and the Palestinian witnesses.As a result of these transcripts, a number of people, even if they had reservations about the quality of Katz's research, no longer had any doubts about what happened in Tantura
Pappé pointed to sections of Israeli society, and particularly the academic department’s move to distort the actuality of the Nakba. In 2007, he was forced to resign from his tenured position at the university for insisting a massacre did take place in Tantura.
Israeli historian Benny Morris believes that ‘’[Palestinian women] were raped, Alexandroni troops may have executed POWs and there may have been looting’’, based on an army report that uses the Hebrew word khabala (sabotage).
A memo from the subdistrict commander to his subordinate on May 29, 1948, six days after the incident: “1) Make sure the bodies of the Arabs at Tantura are buried and prevent an epidemic. 2) It’s not acceptable that you failed to carry out what you were ordered to do. This time I’m referring to the Tantura plan. By now you should have fully completed.”
Israeli historian Yoav Gelbert wrote in an article he published in February, 2022 on the Hebrew-language website Dyoma, that the Alexandroni Brigade soldiers caused “property damage” in Tantura. The source of this claim is IDF correspondence dated June 1, 1948, when the chief of staff’s office sent a cable to the Alexandroni brigade commander stating the following:
“Subject: Tantura
“I was informed by the Department of Arab Affairs that our soldiers who entered Tantura committed many acts of sabotage after [underlined in the original] the conquest and needlessly. Please let me know the extent to which the information provided to me is correct and what you plan to do to prevent such acts in the future.”
The Hebrew word used in the original letter and translated here as “acts of sabotage” is “habalot” – which can be understood in several ways, referring either to damage to property, or bodily damage to people.
Considering the number of people who testified to different killings of groups of men in Tantura after the battle, and the fact that the local commanders were trying, two days prior to this letter, to prevent an epidemic, it’s quite clear that this cable refers to information from members of the Arab Affairs Unit about the horrors they saw; many bodies were still noticeable.
The cable sent by the chief of staff’s office to the Alexandroni brigade commander on June 1, 1948.
It is very unlikely that the chief of staff’s office, just days after the establishment of the IDF, would send such a rebuke to a brigade commander for damage caused to Palestinian Arab property a week earlier. This is because of the context of the time: An all-out war was underway, and PalestinianArab property was being destroyed on a daily basis on multiple fronts and as common practice. Such a letter and a phrase, when read in context by any honest historian with knowledge of the period and the events, should not be interpreted as referring to property damage. Thus, we have a letter from the office of the IDF chief of staff, referencing the many Palestinian Arab casualties caused by Israeli forces after the end of the battle of Tantura.
The story of Tantura had already been told before, as early as 1950, but then it failed to attract the same attention as the Deir Yassin massacre. It appears in the memoirs of a Haifa notable, Muhammad Nimr al-Khatib, who, a few days after the battle, recorded the testimony of a Palestinian who had told him about summary executions on the beach of dozens of Palestinians. Here it is in full:
On the night of 22/23 May the Jews attacked from 3 sides and landed in boats from the seaside. We resisted in the streets and houses and in the morning the corpses were seen everywhere. I shall never forget this day all my life. The Jews gathered all women and children in a place, where they dumped all bodies, for them to see their dead husbands, fathers and brothers and terrorize them, but they remained calm.
They gathered men in another place, took them in groups and shot them dead. When women heard this shooting, they asked their Jewish guard about it. He replied: 'We are taking revenge for our dead.' One officer selected 40 men and took them to the village square. Each four were taken aside. They shot one, and ordered the other three to dump his body in a big pit. Then they shot another and the other two carried his body to the pit and so on.
When they had completed their cleansing operations along the coast, the Alexandroni were instructed to move towards the Upper Galilee:
You are asked to occupy Qadas, Mayrun, Nabi Yehoshua and Malkiyye; Qadas has to be destroyed; the other two should be given to the Golani Brigade and its commander will decide what to do with them. Mayrun should be occupied and handed over to Golani."
The geographical distance between the various locations is quite considerable, revealing again the ambitious pace the troops were expected to maintain their journey of destruction.
In a 2022 Israeli documentary film called Tantura by Alon Schwarz, several Israeli veterans interviewed said they had witnessed a massacre at Tantura after the village had surrendered.
One of the grimmest testimonies in Schwarz’s film is that of Amitzur Cohen, who talked about his first months as a combat soldier in the war:
“I was a murderer. I didn’t take prisoners.”
Cohen relates that if a squad of Arab soldiers was standing with their hands raised, he would shoot them all. How many Palestinians did he kill outside the framework of the battles?
“I didn’t count. I had a machine gun with 250 bullets. I can’t say how many.”
Moshe Diamant, one of the Israeli veterans who finally came out clean about the massacre, was reported by Haaretz as saying:
“It mustn’t be told, it could cause a whole scandal. I don’t want to talk about it, but it happened. What can you do? It happened.”
According to Diamant, speaking now, villagers were shot to death by a ‘savage’ using a submachine gun, at the conclusion of the battle,” the Isreali newspaper reported.
Another former Israeli soldier said:
“It’s not nice to say this. They put them into a barrel and shot them in the barrel. I remember the blood in the barrel.”
The testimonies and documents that Schwarz collected for his film indicate that after the massacre the victims were buried in a mass grave, which is now under the Dor Beach parking lot. The grave was dug especially for this purpose, and the burial went on for more than a week. At the end of May 1948, a week after the village was conquered, and two weeks after the declaration of statehood, one of the commanders who was posted at the site was reprimanded for not having dealt properly with the burial of the Palestinian bodies. On June 9, the commander of the adjacent base reported:
“Yesterday I checked the mass grave in Tantura cemetery. Found everything in order.”
A note dated June 9, 1948, says: "To the region commander. Yesterday I checked the mass grave in Tantura cemetery. Found everything in order.” Credit: IDF Archives.
In one of the more dramatic scenes in the documentary, Drora Pilpel, who was the judge in the libel suit against Katz, listens to a recording of one of Katz’s interviews. It was the first time she had encountered the testimony collected by Katz, whose speedy apology brought the trial to a quick end. “If it’s true, it’s a pity,” the retired judge tells the director after removing her headphones. “If he had things like this, he should have gone all the way to the end.”
There are several mass graves, in different locations. The area where it is said that bones were found in the ‘90s is near the beach, behind the house of the Yahya family, which still stands. The large trench from which it’s suspected that skeletons were removed is under the parking lot of Dor Beach.
The trench suspected of being a cleared mass grave at Tantura, visibly open in aerial photos taken over a year and a half after the battle, is 35 meters by 4 meters. Next to it is a mound of soil.Credit: Photos by Survey of Israel.
The trench suspected of being a cleared mass-burial site, visibly open in aerial photos taken in 1949, over a year and a half after the massacre, is 35 meters long by 4 meters wide. A mound of soil is clearly visible next to it. As it’s no small matter to advance such a claim, the military aerial photos were carefully reviewed and inspected by five different independent analysts. In the aerial image from 1949, one can see clearly see the open trench, which resembles large mass graves known to us from other parts of the world. The contents of this large grave had probably been removed by heavy machinery, and undertaken by either a state or local entity. This is the location of the mass grave described in most of the testimonies. It also corresponds to the description of a mass grave next to the cemetery that appears in a document from the IDF archives.
In 2023, Forensic Architecture published its commissioned investigation of the area and concluded that there were three potential mass graves in the area of the Tel Dor beach that were connected to a massacre.
The possible site of a mass grave in the former Palestinian village of Tantura (Forensic Architecture).
One of the sites in Tantura that Forensic Architecture consider 'very likely' a mass grave (Forensic Architecture).
In conclusion, at least 200–250 victims of the Tantura massacre were buried in mass graves, which today serve as a car park on a nearby beach. In June 1948, a few weeks after Tantura's fall, the Jewish colony of Nachsholim was established on its lands by Holocaust survivors. The village itself was razed, except for a shrine, a fortress, and a few houses. The site of the village is now an Israeli recreational area with swimming facilities, and the fortress houses a museum.
An aerial view of Dor beach in January 2022, which was built over the village of Tantura where a massacre of Palestinians took place after the surrender of the village in 1948.
Remains from the village of Tantura, between the buildings of the colony of Nachsholim, south of Haifa. (Ahmad Al-Bazz).
A short procession through Tantura beach left Israeli holiday-makers baffled.
In its occupation, depopulation, subsequent destruction, and seizure of all its lands by Israel, the fate of Tantura was similar to that of more than 530 other Palestinian villages during the Nakba. But it also shared with many of these villages the additional agony of a large-scale massacre of its inhabitants.