Why did Israel kill 200 unarmed Tantura villagers mostly young men who were shot dead after the village had surrendered ?
Tantura, a coastal fishing village with a population of around 1,500 people in 1945, was situated near Haifa. During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, the village surrendered to Israeli forces. However, instead of a peaceful transition, Israeli forces launched an assault on the village, resulting in the tragic massacre of at least 200 Palestinians.
Young men from the village were mercilessly shot and buried in communal graves. Palestinian women were raped. In a subsequent investigation of this atrocity in the now-destroyed Palestinian village, three mass graves have been identified beneath a beach resort.
Muhammad Abu Hana, who was child at the time of the events in Tantura and now a displaced person in the Yarmouk refugee camp, recounted:
"By morning, the shooting had stopped and the attackers rounded everyone up [...] the women and children on one side, the men on the other. [...] the soldiers led groups of men away, and you could hear gunfire after each departure. [...] I saw bodies piled on a cart pulled by men of Tantura who emptied their cargo in a big pit. [...] On the road, near the railroad tracks, other bodies were scattered about."
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.'
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 who, in 1950, published a book on those days. Muhammad Nimral-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.'