What do Israelis think of the Deir Yassin massacre ?
Most deny it, and those who don’t, try to justify it. Before talking about the massacre and its prelude, let us explore the village history first.
History:
Deir Yasin was a Palestinian village that lied on the eastern slope of an 800-meter-high hill above seal level and commanding a wide view all around it. The village faced the western suburbs of Jerusalem which were 1 kilometer away. The city center of Jerusalem was about 5 kilometers to the east. It was separated from the city by a terraced valley planted with fig, almond, and olive orchards. Along the northern rim of the valley ran a secondary road linking Deir Yassin to the suburbs and to the main Jaffa Road which was about 2 kilometers to the north.
The first part of the village's name Deir is defined as "monastery" in Arabic. According to Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi, this was a common occurrence in Palestinian village names especially those so close to Jerusalem. A large ruin that lay at the southwestern edge of Deir Yassin was known simply as "Deir".
Deir Yassin has been identified as one of the villages given as a fief to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the 12th century. However, in 1136 Fulk, King of Jerusalem confirmed it was a casale under the Knights Hospitallers. It has been suggested that a vaulted building in the center of the village could have been of Crusader or Mamluk origin.
Tawfiq Canaan noted that a yellow stone, popular in the Jerusalem Mamluk ablaq building decorations, was apparently quarried at Deir Yassin towards the end of the fifteenth century.
During the Ottoman era, which began in 1517, the nucleus of settlement activity in the area was Khirbet Ayn al-Tut ("The Ruin of the Mulberry Spring")—some 500 meters west of the 1948 village site. In 1596, this village was under the administration of the nahiya (subdistrict) of Jerusalem, part of the sanjak (district) of Jerusalem. It had a population of seven Muslim households, who paid taxes on wheat, barley, and olive trees; a total of 4,522 akçe. All of the revenue went to a waqf.
It is unknown precisely when settlement shifted to Deir Yassin. The village was named in honor of a certain Sheikh Yassin whose tomb was in a mosque, or shrine located just outside the village, on a high spot, dominating the surrounding area.The village guesthouse, or Madafeh, was located opposite the shrine.
Edward Robinson noted the village in 1838, and by 1870, an Ottoman village list indicated 13 houses and a population of 48, though the list only counted men. In 1896 the population of Deir Yassin was estimated to be about 138 persons.
In the late 19th century, the houses of Deir Yassin were built of stone. Two springs—one located in the north and another in the south—supplied water to the village. Most of its houses, strongly built with thick walls, were clustered in a small area known as the Hara meaning "Quarter" or "Neighborhood". All residents were Muslims.
Deir Yassin faced the Jewish colonial settlements of West Jerusalem, which at the time included six colonial settlements, the closest of which was Givat Shaul. These colonies formed a formidable barrier between Deir Yasin and Jerusalem. The village's only link to the outside world was a single dirt road north of the valley that ran through Givat Shaul and then to Jerusalem. A terraced valley with almond, fig, and olive trees and grape orchards separated the village from the colonies. The nearest Palestinian Arab villages were Lifta and Ayn Karem.
During World War I, the Ottomans fortified the hilltop of Deir Yassin as part of the defense system of Jerusalem, but on December 8, 1917, these fortifications were stormed by the Allied Forces under Edmund Allenby. The following day Jerusalem fell to the British. Until the 1920s, Deir Yassin's inhabitants mostly depended on agriculture and livestock for income, but the extensive building projects in Jerusalem in the British Mandate period transformed the basis of its economy.
Deir Yassin's inhabitants prospered from mining, its main source of employment. A rich vein of hard yellow limestone was prized for its resistance to the rigors of Jerusalem's climate. The quarry (hajar yasinik or "Yasin's stone") supplied the Jerusalem market, and the wealth allowed the village to develop spacious housing, two elementary schools and mosques. By the late 1940s, there were four stone crushers functioning in the village. The business encouraged the wealthier inhabitants to invest in trucking while others became truck drivers. In 1935, a local bus company was established in a joint venture with the neighboring Palestinian Arab village of Lifta. As Deir Yassin prospered, houses radiated from the Hara uphill and eastward, towards Jerusalem.
By 1943, two elementary schools were built—one for boys and one for girls. The girls' school had a resident headmistress from Jerusalem. At that time, Deir Yassin also had a bakery, two guesthouses, and a social club—the "Renaissance Club", a thrift fund, three shops, four wells and a second mosque. Many inhabitants were employed outside the village in the nearby British Army camps as waiters, carpenters, and foremen; others as clerks and teachers in the mandatory civil service.
The total land area of the village consisted of 2,857 dunams, of which 94.5% was Palestinian Arab-owned. Cultivable land amounted to a total of 866 dunams (30%), all of which was grown with grains and owned mostly by Palestinian Arabs. The built-up area of the village was 12 dunams.
Khirbet Ayn al-Tut had a population of 39 in 1596, during early Ottoman rule. In the 1922 British Mandate census, Deir Yassin had a population of 254. Its population had increased from 429 in the 1931 census to 750 in 1948 and its houses from 91 in the former year to 144 in the latter. The five hamulas (clans) of Deir Yassin were the Shahada, 'Aql, Hamidad, Jabir and Jundi.
Relations between Deir Yassin and its Jewish neighbors had started reasonably well under the Ottomans, particularly early on when Arabic-speaking Sephardic Yemenite Jews comprised much of the surrounding population. Relations rapidly deteriorated with the growth of European Zionism in Palestine and reached their apex during the Arab revolt in 1936-1939. Relations picked up again during the economic boom years of full employment of World War II. Thus, in 1948, Deir Yassin was a prosperous, expanding village at relative peace with its Jewish colonial neighbors with whom much business was done.
Prelude:
The village was determined to remain neutral, and as such refused to have Arab soldiers stationed there. Not only were they neutral, they also had a non-aggression pact signed with the Haganah. Their agreement with Zionist colonists was based on maintaining good relations, exchange information on movement of outsiders through village territory, and ensure the safety of vehicles from the village. The inhabitants of Deir Yassin upheld the agreement scrupulously. The villagers were dedicated to peace and coexistence. However, the existence of a friendly and prosperous Palestinian village, approved of by Jews, with whom they traded, did not fit in with the Zionist narrative. Thus, Deir Yassin’s fate was sealed, especially since it was also in the territory of the Jewish state lined out in Plan D.
The assault on Deir Yasin was preceded by political and military developments that strongly influenced the course of events. After the Partition Plan for Palestine was passed in November 1947, war broke out. Within the Zionist Movement , there was a military rivalry between the Haganah on the one hand and the Irgun(Etzel) and LEHI-Stern Gang on the other. The Haganah, led by David Ben-Gurion (born David Grün), represented the workers' faction while the latter two represented the rightist trend that was inspired by the teachings of Ze'ev Jabotinsky, with Menachem Begin as its most prominent leader. This rivalry was expressed through acts of terrorism against Palestinians, the deadliest of which took place in Jerusalem and its neighboring countryside.
In the first two weeks of April 1948, the balance of power between the Zionists and the Palestinians shifted dramatically; on 4 April the Zionist leadership set into motion Plan Dalet, whose goal was to occupy and ethnically cleanse the area allocated by the Partition Plan to the proposed Jewish state, in addition to whatever territory could be captured from the land allocated to the Arab state, especially the city of Jerusalem and its surrounding area.
The decision to attack Deir Yasin was taken after the Haganah forces attacked and occupied the strategically located Palestinian village of al-Qastal. Yitzhak Levi, the head of Haganah intelligence in Jerusalem at the time, said that Deir Yasin was chosen because the Irgun and Stern militias had relatively few resources and could not launch an operation on as large a scale as those of the Haganah. In addition to needing credit for some operations to avoid being marginalized in Jewish public opinion, they had other goals: to take revenge for the battles of Kfar Etzion and Atarot, to pillage and plunder (Deir Yasin was one of the wealthier Palestinian Arab villages), and to find an outlet for the racist hatred built up inside them.
According to the attack plan adopted by the leaderships of the Irgun and Stern Gang, their militias would mobilize simultaneously at four strategic points: one group would advance from Givat Shaul and another would advance from the east into the village center, led by an armored vehicle with a loudspeaker attached to it. A third would start from the Beit HaKerem colonial settlement to attack the village from the southeast, at the Shaykh Yasin mosque, while a fourth would also come from Beit HaKerem and outflank the village by attacking from the west. The leaders discussed how they would treat women, children, the elderly, and prisoners. The majority decided that all the men and anyone assisting them would be liquidated. The operation date was set for Friday, 9 April, at 5:15 a.m. The correspondence and recorded conversations between the leaders of the Irgun and Stern and Haganah commanders show that the Haganahapproved the attack on Deir Yasin and that the fate of the village was thus sealed. The Hagana decided to send the Irgun and Stern Gang troops, so as to absolve themselves from any official accountability. In the subsequent cleansings of 'friendly' villages even this ploy would no longer be deemed necessary.
In the weeks before the massacre, the residents of Deir Yasin were extremely fearful and apprehensive. Despite the nonaggression pact that the village elders had struck with the Givat Shaul colonial settlement in January 1948, the villagers sensed that the situation was not safe, especially after the capture of al-Qastal, in whose battle many of Deir Yasin's villagers fought and Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini was martyred. The men were on high alert, guarding the village in shifts and armed only with old rifles.
The carnage was carried out by Irgun and Stern Gang terrorist groups, led by Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir (born Yitzhak Yezernitsky), respectively. Both Begin and Shamir later became prime ministers of Israel.
According to the Irgun officer, Yehuda Lapidot, the Stern Gang,
"put forward a proposal to liquidate the residents of the village after the conquest in order to show the Arabs what happens when the Irgun and the Stern Gang set out together on an operation"
In earlier testimony he had claimed that "the reason was mainly economic", "to capture booty" to supply Irgun and Lehi's bases with.
One of the aims of the attack was "to break Arab morale" and create panic throughout Palestine. According to Israeli historian Benny Morris, it was agreed during planning meetings that the residents would be expelled. Lehi further proposed that any villagers who failed to flee should be killed to terrify the rest of the country's Arabs.
Benzion Cohen, the Irgun commander of the raid, later recalled that at the pre-attack meeting:
"the majority was for liquidation of all the men in the village and any others found that opposed us, whether it be old people, women and children."
The massacre:
On 9 April 1948, the assault began under the cover of darkness, the villagers fought heroically until their ammunition was exhausted. Zionist sources mention that the attackers faced fierce resistance and sustained casualties, which made them call for reinforcements from the Haganah to be able to continue their assault, but it was always an unequal battle. When the two groups (with the help of the Haganah) were able to enter Deir Yasin, its members began massacring the villagers. Using brutal methods (including blowing up houses with their residents trapped still alive inside them), they killed and maimed indiscriminately—men, women, children, the elderly—and openly desecrated their bodies. Entire families were murdered and wiped out. Palestinian women were raped, then killed. A row of children was stood against a wall and then sprayed with bullets ‘just for the fun of it’. The terrorist attackers sacked the village, looting everything they could get their hands on. Then, they loaded the villagers they took as prisoners (they referred to them as “enemy combatants”) onto trucks, stole anything valuable they possessed, and paraded them in a victory procession in Jewish neighborhoods to be spat upon, stoned, and eventually murdered. Accounts of the massacre are replete with survivor testimony about the savagery of the killers; many witnessed entire families get killed and gave the names of the killed.
Mohammed Aref Sammour witnessed the slaughter of many of his relatives and neighbors.
In a house not far from his own,
"There were 25 people, 24 were killed and only one could escape through a window. They used grenades and after they stormed the house they used machine guns. In another house they captured a boy who was holding the knee of his mother. They slaughtered him in front of her."
Sammour saw a family of 11 people attempt to surrender but the terrorists gunned them down, including a woman of 80 and a boy of 3 or 4 years old.In another case, 2 villagers were tied back to back and a stick of dynamite was placed between their heads; the stick of dynamite was shot blowing the heads off of the victims.
According to another survivor interviewed several years ago by Badil:
"There was a youth with them, his name was Abdallah Abdelmajid Samour. He was 23 years old and working with the telephones. He had a small son of three-four months. At Racheli's house they saw him among the women, took him off the truck, shot him in front of his wife and his mother, dragged him on his back about 100 meters on the ground to a quarry - there is a quarry there, about 10 meter deep - and they threw him into the quarry. There were eight youth, my dear - you reminded me - they put them up along the wall of Haja Sabha Radwan - I am sure the wall is still there - and they shot them in one row in front of the women, eight youth.
Aref Samir in 1981 stated:
From 5:00 A.M. until about 11:00 A.M. there was a systematic slaughter, with them going from house to house. From the eastern edge of the village nobody came out unhurt. Whole families were slaughtered. At 6:00 in the morning they caught 21 young people from the village, about 25 years old, they stood them in a row, near where the post-office is today, and executed them. Many women who watched this horrifying spectacle went crazy, and some are in institutions to this day. A pregnant woman, who was coming back with her son from the bakery, was murdered and her belly was smashed, after her son was killed before her eyes. In one of the conquered village houses a Bren machine gun was set up, which shot everyone who got in its line of fire. My cousin went out to see what happened to his uncle, who was shot a few minutes before, and he was killed too. His father, who went out after him, was murdered by the same Bren, and the mother, who came to find out what happened to her loved ones, died beside them. Aish eydan, who was a guard in Givat Shaul, came to see what was happening, and he was killed.
Mohammed Jabar, a boy at the time, remembered hiding under a bed and observing the attackers "break in, drive everybody outside, put them against the wall and shot them." He said one of the victims was a mother with her baby. Zeinab Akkel claimed she offered her life savings to an attacker in exchange for sparing her younger brothers life: "my husband had given me $400. I offered it ... and said, 'Please leave my brother alone, he is so young.'" He took the money "and shot him in the head with five bullets." Zeidan, who was taken prisoner, recalled meeting another group of captives: "We walked with some other women from the village, then came across a young man and an older man, with their hands up in the air, under guard." "When they reached us, the soldiers shot them." The young man's mother was in Zeidan's group and she started hitting the fighters that killed her son, so"one of them stabbed her with a knife a few times."
Houses and corpses were pillaged and money and jewelry were stolen from prisoners.
The following survivor accounts of Deir Yassin appeared in the Dossier 179/110/17/GS and were labeled "Secret" and were the result of an investigation about 4 days after the capture of the village. They were notmade generally available for 25 years so it is difficult to assume it was made for anti-Irgun propaganda purposes at the time. If anything keeping it secret indicates the British protecting the reputation of the Irgun.
Some survivor statements from the reports are below:
Mr. Fahimi Zeidan, 12:
"The Jews ordered all our family to line up against the wall and they started shooting us. I was hit in the side, but most of us children were saved because we hid behind our parents. The bullets hit my sister Kadri [four] in the head, my sister Sameh [eight] in the cheek, my brother Mohammed [seven] in the chest. But all the others with us against the wall were killed: my father, my mother, my grandfather and grandmother, my uncles and aunts and some of their children."
They took us out one after the other; shot an old man and when one of his daughters cried, she was shot too. Then they called my brother Muhammad, and shot him in front us, and when my mother yelled, bending over him- carrying my little sister Hudra in her hands, still breastfeeding her- they shot her too."
Zaydan himself was shot, too, while standing in a row of children the Jewish soldiers had lined up against a wall, which they had then sprayed with bullets, 'just for the fun of it', before they left. He was lucky to survive his wounds.
Ms. Haleema Eid, 30:
"A man [shot] a bullet into the neck of my sister Salhiyeh who was nine months pregnant. Then he cut her stomach open with a butcher's knife."
Ms. Haaneh Khalil, 16, saw a man:
"take a kind of sword and slash my neighbor Jamila from head to toe, then do the same thing on the steps to my house to my cousin Fathi."
Ms. Safiyeh Attiyah, 41, describes how she was come upon by a man who suddenly opened up his trousers and pounced on her:
"I screamed but around me other women were being raped too…. After that they tore off our clothes so that they could fondle our breasts and our bodies with gestures too horrible to describe…. Some of the men were so anxious to get our earrings they ripped our ears to pull them off faster."
Perhaps one of the most graphic witness testimonials comes from Othman Akel:
“I saw the Zionist terrorist soldiers ordering the bakery man of the village to throw his son in the oven and burn him alive. The son is holding the clothes of his father tightly and crying from fear and pleading to his father not to do it. the father refuses and then the soldiers hit him in his gut so hard it caused him to fall on the floor. Other soldiers held his son, Abdel Rauf, and threw him in the oven and told his father to toast him well-done meat. Other soldiers took the baker himself , Hussain al-Shareef, and threw him, too, in the oven, telling him, “follow your son, he needs you there”.
The precursor to the Israeli army, the Haganah militia, played a significant role in the attack by providing mortar fire support, covering fire, ammunition, squad reinforcements entering the village and assisting in the disposal of the victims' bodies. Notably, the Haganah was under the control of David Ben-Gurion (born David Grün) who would assume the role of Israel's first prime minister just over a month after the massacre occurred.
Meir Pa'il, one of the Palmach's intelligence officers at the time who was charged by the Haganah leadership with monitoring the operation and preparing a report on it, says that the massacre carried out by the Irgun and Stern was indiscriminate and that no one was spared. He reported the victory procession that went around Jerusalem displaying the captured, after which twenty-five of the men were unloaded from the trucks and shot in cold blood.
Yehuda Feder of Lehi a few days after the attack wrote about machine gunning three Palestinian Arab prisoners:
"In the village I killed an armed Arab man and two Arab girls of 16 or 17who were helping the Arab who was shooting. I stood them against a wall and blasted them with two rounds from the Tommy gun."
Along with that, he tells about looting in the village with his buddies after it was occupied.:
“We confiscated a lot of money and silver and gold jewelry fell into our hands,”
Shaltiel got reports on what was happening in Deir Yassin and sent Gichon there for a checkup.
When Gichon reached there he told them:
"not to throw the bodies into cisterns and caves, because that was the first place that would be checked."
He described beatings, looting, and the stripping of jewelry and money from prisoners. He wrote that the initial orders were to take the men prisoner and send the women and children away, but the order was changed to kill all the prisoners. The mukhtar's son was killed in front of his mother and sisters, he said. The most detailed report comes from Pa'il who spied on the revisionists on behalf of the Haganah:
The dissidents were going about the village robbing and stealing everything: Chickens, radio sets, sugar, money, gold and more ... Each dissident walked about the village dirty with blood and proud of the number of persons he had killed. Their lack of education and intelligence as compared to our soldiers [i.e., the Haganah] was apparent.
Yehoshua Zettler, the Jerusalem commander of Lehi, described the Arabs fleeing from their homes:
“They ran like cats …..I won’t tell you that we were there with kid gloves on. House after house ... we’re putting in explosives and they are running away. An explosion and move on, an explosion and move on and within a few hours, half the village isn’t there any more,”.
The Israeli historian Benny Morris writes that the killing continued after April 9. Some villagers who had either hidden or pretended to be dead were apparently killed on April 10 or 11.
A Shai report from April 12 to Shaltiel read:
"Some of the women and children were taken prisoner by the Lehi and transferred to Sheik Bader [Lehi's headquarter in Jerusalem]. Among the prisoners were a young woman and a baby. The camp guards killed the baby before the mother's eyes. After she fainted they killed her too."
During the Deir Yassin massacre, Zionist terrorists bayoneted the abdomens of 25 pregnant women, forcibly taking out their unborn fetuses while these women were still alive to witness the indescribable horror as they took their last excruciating breaths. They murdered 60 women and girls, mutilated their bodies, butchered nursing babies, and maimed 52 children before decapitating them right before their mothers’ eyes.
Zionist terrorists took surviving women and girls in the village, stripped them of their clothes and jewelry, then paraded them along King George Avenue in the Jewish quarters of Jerusalem, where spectators subjected them to mockery and insults and threw stones at them.
Other stories include tying a villager to a tree before burning him, rape and disembowelment. Dead villagers were thrown into pits by the dozen. Many were decapitated or mutilated. Houses were looted and destroyed. A number of prisoners were taken, put in cuffs, and paraded around West Jerusalem as war trophies, before being executed and dumped in the village quarry.
Israeli historian Benny Morris said the militias:
“ransacked unscrupulously, stole money and jewels from the survivors and burned the bodies. Even dismemberment and rape occurred.”
Natan Friedman-Yellin, a criminal himself, found the Deir Yassin massacre to be “inhuman.” He was a joint commander of the Jewish Stern Gang in 1948, yet he could not swallow his colleagues’ actions.
On April 14, the British Assistant Inspector General of the Criminal Investigation Division, Richard Catling, visited several homes in the neighboring village of Silwan and collected the testimonies of women who survived the Deir Yassin massacre.
Physical evidence collected through the medical examinations of survivors conducted by a doctor and nurse from the Government Hospital in Jerusalem corroborated these reports. The following is his account:
I interviewed many of the women folk in order to glean some information on any atrocities committed in Deir Yassin but the majority of those women are very shy and reluctant to relate their experiences especially in matters concerning sexual assault and they need great coaxing before they will divulge any information. The recording of statements is hampered also by the hysterical state of the women who often break down many times whilst the statement is being recorded. There is, however, no doubt that many sexual atrocities were committed by the attacking Jews. Many young schoolgirls were raped and later slaughtered.Old women were also molested. One story is current concerning a case in which a young girl was literally torn in two. Many infants were also butchered and killed. I also saw one old woman who gave her age as one hundred and four who had been severely beaten about the head with rifle butts. Women had bracelets torn from their arms and rings from their fingers and parts of some of the women's ears were severed in order to remove earrings.
A Mossad intelligence officer arrived in Deir Yassin to the sight of the Irgun and Stern Gang members incinerating bodies:
We witnessed a most horrible and dreadful scene…. [Irgun] men were throwing Arab corpses into a house from the roof, while a huge fire was burning. It was really like a crematorium. Besides that horror, I saw many wood fires along the path on which corpses were burning. The stench in the air was unbearable.
In 1982, the then-commander of the Haganah, Zvi Ankoi, described the atrocities he witnessed at the scene of the Deir Yassin massacre:
“I saw cut-off genitalia and women’s crushed stomachs. It was direct murder. Soldiers shot everyone they saw, including women and children. Parents begged commanders to stop the slaughter, to please stop shooting.”
Irgun commander Ben-Zion Cohen, who participated in the attack, later stated that:
"If there were another three or four more Deir Yassins in the Land of Israel at the time, not a single Arab would have remained in Israel".
Former member of the Irgun terrorist group and later Prime Minister of Israel, Menachem Begin summarized the orgy of executions at Deir Yassin and described the attack on this peaceful Palestinian Arab village as ‘absolutely necessary’ in the creation of the state of Israel.
“Without what was done at Deir Yassin there would not have been a State of Israel,” he wrote in his book, The Revolt. “While the Haganah was carrying out successful attacks on the other fronts…The Arabs began fleeing in panic, shouting ‘Deir Yassin.’”
IOn Dec 4, 1948, The New York Times published an open letter condemning Begin, the Irgun and the Israeli Freedom Party, describing the latter as "a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties." The letter stated that "The Deir Yassin incident exemplifies the character and actions of the Freedom Party." The Irgun was characterized as "a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization."Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt were among the letter's signatories.
Four nearby villages were next- Qalunya, Saris, Beit Surik and Biddu. Taking only an hour or so in each village, the Hagana units blew up the houses and expelled the people. Ironically, Hagana officers claimed they had to struggle with their subordinates in order to prevent a frenzy of looting at the end of each occupation. Ben-Ari, who supervised the sappers unit that blew up the houses, recounts in his memoirs how he had single-handedly stopped the plunder of these villages, but this claim seems exaggerated to say the least, given that the peasants ran away with nothing while their possessions found their way into the living rooms and farms of both soldiers and officers as war time mementos.
According to Zochrot, an Israeli NGO that works to support the full right of return of Palestinians who were expelled during the creation of Israel, 55 young children were orphaned as a result of the Deir Yassin massacre.
Palestinian activist Hind al-Husseini, who was 31 at the time, found the orphans near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem’s Old City. On April 25, two weeks after the massacre, Hind founded Dar Al-Tifel Al-Arabi at her family’s mansion. The organisation catered to Deir Yassin orphans, and later to orphans from all over Palestine.
It is important to note that this massacre was carried out before the 1948 war. It posed no threat and was not part of any military action. More recently, Zionist revisionists have tried to frame the massacre as a battle because the village guards put up resistance to the invading militias. In typical Zionist fashion, I’m certain that even had the villagers lain on the ground and died without resistance, they would have found a way to blame them for their deaths anyway.
It is also noteworthy to point out again that because the village had a non-aggression pact with the Haganah, it was the Stern and Lehi that carried out this massacre. The Yishuv offered a few words of condemnation, but later the name of Deir Yassin would be seen listed next to successful operations. In the future, there would not even be the charade of caring about non-aggression pacts or the neutrality of villages that were designated for ethnic cleansing.
After carrying out the massacre the two terrorist groups convened a press conference exclusively for the American print and radio media, where they bragged about the military victory and occupation of Deir Yasin and the massacre of its inhabitants. They also boasted of the participation of the Palmach in the assault, which was a source of great embarrassment for the Jewish Agency. They claimed that they had killed 245 Arabs, a number that was repeated in media accounts. The New York Times on April 13 put the number at just over 200. According to a 1948 report filed by the British delegation to the United Nations, the killing of “some 250 Arabs, men, women and children, took place in circumstances of great savagery”.
“Women and children were stripped, lined up, photographed, and then slaughtered by automatic firing and survivors have told of even more incrediblebestialities,”
the report said.
“Those who were taken prisoners were treated with degrading brutality.”
Once news of the massacre had gotten out, a delegation from the Red Cross tried to visit the village. However, they weren’t allowed to visit the site until a day after the time they had requested. Meanwhile the Zionists tried to cover up the evidence of their crime. However, a representative of the Red Cross eventually entered Deir Yassin on April 11 and reported seeing the bodies of some 150 people heaped haphazardly in a cave, while around 50 were amassed in a separate location.Jacques de Reynier, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross delegation in Jerusalem, is considered the most prominent eyewitness to the Deir Yasin massacre, since he was the only foreigner who was able to enter the village and document what he witnessed. After he received an official Arab request to travel to Deir Yasin, he was advised by the Jewish Agency and the Haganah leadership to stay out of the matter; they refused to guarantee his safety should he decide to visit the village. However, he remained determined and managed to enter the village on 11 April. He describes what he saw there:
The gang [the Irgun detachment] was wearing country uniforms with helmets. All of them were young, some even adolescents, men and women, armed to the teeth: revolvers, machine-guns, hand grenades, and also cutlasses in their hands, most of them still blood-stained. A beautiful young girl, with criminal eyes, showed me hers still dripping with blood; she displayed it like a trophy. This was the "cleaning up" team, that was obviously performing its task very conscientiously.
I tried to go into a house. A dozen soldiers surrounded me, their machine-guns aimed at my body, and their officer forbade me to move ... I then flew into one of the most towering rages of my life, telling these criminals what I thought of their conduct, threatening them with everything I could think of, and then pushed them aside and went into the house
...I found some bodies, cold. Here the "cleaning up" had been done with machine-guns, then hand grenades. It had been finished off with knives, anyone could see that ... as I was about to leave, I heard something like a sigh. I looked everywhere, turned over all the bodies, and eventually found a little foot, still warm. It was a little girl of ten, mutilated by a hand grenade, but still alive ...
In his memoirs, published in 1950, de Reynier wrote:
A total of more than 200 dead, men, women, and children. About 150cadavers have not been preserved inside the village in view of the danger represented by the bodies' decomposition. They have been gathered, transported some distance, and placed in a large trough (I have not been able to establish if this is a pit, a grain silo, or a large natural excavation). ... [One body was] a woman who must have been eight months pregnant, hit in the stomach, with powder burns on her dress indicating she'd been shot point-blank.
He also wrote that some of the 150 cadavers had been decapitated and disemboweled. After his inspection, the Irgun asked him to sign a document to say he had been received courteously and thanking them for their help. When he refused, they told him he would sign it if he valued his life. "The only course open to me was to convince them that I did not value my life in the least," he wrote.
Of course, apart from the victims of the massacre itself, dozens of others were killed in the fighting, and hence were not included in the official list of victims. However, as the Jewish forces regarded any Palestinian village as an enemy military base, the distinction between massacring people and killing them 'in battle' was slight. It is possible that the Zionist forces exaggerated the number of victims and deliberately publicized the horrifying details of the massacre with the aim of provoking panic among Palestinians, which would push many of them to leave out of fear of meeting a similar fate.
In conclusion, the number of those massacred is disputed but ranges from 107 to 250, with the number of wounded estimated to be between 12 and 50.
Women, children under age 15, and old men made up 75 percent of the total killed. Thirty babies were among those slaughtered in Deir Yassin.The massacre of Palestinians at Deir Yassin is one of the most significant events in 20th-century Palestinian history. This is not because of its size or its brutality, but because it stands as the starkest early warning of a calculated expulsion of over 750,000 Palestinian inhabitants to make room for survivors of the Holocaust and other Jews from all over the world.
Deir Yasin had been abandoned to fight its battle on its own; a contingent of the Arab Liberation Army in the nearby village of Ayn Karem, did not intervene, claiming it had not received any orders. The British issued an official communiqué to announce that the UK government had decided to carry out an airstrike on the Jews who occupied Deir Yasin but that it desisted after discovering that the assailants had already left the village.
Palestinians tried to mobilize public opinion around the world through the press and whatever platforms they could use to spread the news of the massacre as widely as possible. But their efforts ended up having the opposite result: instead of influencing the international community to act, it ended up having a negative impact on the morale of Palestinians in other areas. This was not the outcome Dr.Hussein Fakhri al-Khalidi, general secretary of the Arab Higher Committee (Hay'a) in Jerusalem, had in mind when he broadcast a statement about the massacre with the aim of exposing and denouncing the Zionists and appealing to the Arabs' sense of honor and pride. However, the massacre did remove King Faruq's hesitancy when, on 12 April, he informed Arab leaders that Egypt would join the Arab armies in defending Palestine with the expected British evacuation of the country on 15 May.
This tragic event had far-reaching consequences, as it helped in triggering a mass exodus of Palestinians from their homes and lands, not only in and around Jerusalem but also further afield. The Deir Yassin massacre marked a pivotal moment in the broader campaign of ethnic cleansing carried out by Zionist militias and the emerging Israeli army. This campaign aimed to establish Israel as a Jewish-majority state in Palestine, reshaping the demographics and geography of the region.
The Deir Yassin massacre in addition to other massacres committed by zionist forces, and the resulting feeling of terrified Palestinians across their borders played a crucial role in convincing the leaders of neighbouring Arab countries, who had initially been hesitant to intervene, to take military action. Ultimately, this led to their involvement in the conflict.
As a consequence of these events, and during Israel's establishment on 78 percent of Palestine, around three-quarters of the Palestinian population were forcibly expelled from their homeland. This mass displacement significantly shaped the demographics and boundaries of the region and has remained a key aspect of the Palestinian question.
By the end of the Nakba, more than 530 Palestinian villages had been depopulated; some were erased completely. In the 1980s, most of the remaining abandoned parts of the Deir Yassin village were bulldozed to make way for new neighborhoods, and most of the Deir Yassin cemetery was bulldozed to make way for a highway. Today, a psychiatric hospital stands on the remains of some village houses. What used to be the city centre is now a bus station. In 1949, the colonial settlement of Givat Shaul Bet was established on the ruins of Deir Yassin as an extension of the earlier settlement built in 1906. In the early 1980s, the usurpation of the village’s lands continued, when the Haf Nof colonial settlement was established.
In 1992, Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi wrote:
Many of the village houses on the hill are still standing and have been incorporated into an Israeli hospital for the mentally ill that was established on the site. Some houses outside the fence of the hospital grounds are used for residential and commercial purposes, or as warehouses. Outside the fence, there are carob and almond trees and the stumps of olive trees. Several wells are located at the southwestern edge of the site. The old village cemetery, southeast of the site, is unkempt and threatened by debris from a ring road that has been constructed around the village hill. One tall cypress tree still stands at the center of the cemetery.