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I’m reading again about the early days of the 1948 Nakba, and I’m just… at loss for words (cw:…

I’m reading again about the early days of the 1948 Nakba, and I’m just… at loss for words (cw:…

July 1, 2026

I’m reading again about the early days of the 1948 Nakba, and I’m just… at loss for words (cw: rape, child murder)

On 9 April 1948, Jewish forces occupied the village of Deir Yassin. It lay on a hill west of] erusalem, eight hundred metres above sea level and close to the Jewish neighbourhood of Givat Shaul. The old village school serves
today as a mental hospital for the western Jewish neighbourhood that expanded over the destroyed village.

As they burst into the village, the Jewish soldiers sprayed the houses with machine-gun fire, killing many of the inhabitants. The remaining villagers were then gathered in one place and murdered in cold blood, their bodies abused while a number of the women were raped and then killed."

Fahim Zaydan, who was twelve years old at the time, recalled how he saw his family murdered in front of his eyes:

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.

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, by Ilan Pappé (2006, p. 90)

And, continuing on p. 91:

One only has to be told that thirty babies were among the slaughtered in Deir Yassin to understand why the whole 'quantitative' exercise - which the Israelis repeated as recently as April 2002 in the massacre in lenin - is
insignificant. At the time, the Jewish leadership proudly announced a high number of victims so as to make Deir Yassin the epicentre of the catastrophe - a warning to all Palestinians that a similar fate awaited them if they refused to abandon their homes and take flight.