Deir Yassin was a Palestinian Arab village located approximately 6 km west of Jerusalem. In 1948, its population was 750 people, residing in 144 houses. In 1943, it had both a girls' and boys' school.
On the morning of Friday, April 9, 1948, Zionist gangs from the terrorist groups "Irgun" and "Stern" launched a surprise attack on the village, destroying it and killing its inhabitants while maintaining occupation of the area. This was ordered by the leader of the Haganah in Jerusalem, David Shaltiel, who informed them that this operation was part of the Haganah's plan.
On April 9, 1948, one hundred and twenty members of the Stern and Irgun gangs launched their attack on the village. After the killings, they roamed the streets of the village chanting joyfully about their victory and the killing of innocent women, children, and elderly. The members of the gangs paraded with the victims' bodies and threw them into the village well. The number of martyrs in this massacre reached 245.
Details of the massacre:
The Zionist leadership devised a plan to attack the village from 4 directions. The first advance came from the settlement of Giv'at Shaul, with a loudspeaker-equipped armored vehicle advancing from the east into the heart of the village. The third axis originated from the Beit Hakerem colony to invade from the southeast at Sheikh Yasin Mosque, and the fourth axis departed from Beit Hakerem and launched a flanking movement from the west.
The massacre began at dawn when the Zionists stormed the village and surprised its sleeping residents. The youth of the village resisted, but their resistance did not last long against the Zionist shelling with mortar shells, paving the way for the invasion. The Zionists blew up the homes of Palestinians and killed anyone in motion. They stopped children, elders, and young people on the walls and paraded them through the streets of Jerusalem, then executed them by gunfire.
A journalist described the details of the massacre, stating, "It was something even beasts would hesitate to commit. The killers brought a Palestinian girl and raped her in the presence of her family, then began torturing her and threw her into the fire. They mutilated the bodies of the martyrs and dismembered them, and buried them in the village well."
Impact of the massacre:
The Deir Yassin massacre marked the beginning of the collapse of an entire community, with approximately 500 Palestinian villages evacuated after Deir Yassin. Jaffa, Haifa, Acre, and others became deserted within a few months.
The Zionist gangs killed about 245 Palestinians, slit the bellies of 30 pregnant women, and raped many village women. They displayed the bodies of the martyrs and threw them into the village well.
Menachem Begin, after the massacre, held a press conference and explicitly declared, "We killed 245 Arabs!"
The Zionist gangs deliberately spread news of the massacre widely and sensationalized it to spread terror in Palestinian villages.
Salah Khalaf recounts in his book "A Palestinian Without Identity" the impact of the news of the massacre on the morale of Palestinians in Jaffa. The news of the genocide sparked widespread violence in the city, and what terrified the people the most was the news of the rape of women, leading to the phrase "Honor before land" becoming a refrain.
Film titled "I Was There | Deir Yassin Massacre" produced by Arab TV
Film from the "Palestine27K" channel
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