October: Zionist war crimes season
The month of October is a month that is remembered throughout Palestine as the month of Zionist massacres against Palestinian civilians. The list of war crimes includes:
- The Massacre of Dawayma (October 29, 1948)
- The Massacre in the Village of Eilaboun (October 30, 1948)
- The Massacre in Ba'na and Dair al-Asad (October 31, 1948)
- The Massacre of Kibya (October 14, 1953)
- The Massacre in the Village of Qalqiliya (October 10, 1956)
- The Massacre of Kafr Qasim (October 29, 1956)
- Al-Aqsa Mosque Massacre I (October 8, 1990)
The list is by no means a complete list of all crimes perpetrated against Palestinian civilians. But it highlights some of the most barbaric of these crimes. None of the listed crimes involved Palestinians firing at the Zionist soliders. In fact, the only massacre where Palestinians were resisting was the last one in 1990, where they were throwing stones at soldiers who were “forced to” fire live ammunition.
The soldiers, officers, and politicians responsible for these crimes were never brought before justice. In fact, the commander of the Kibya Massacre, Ariel Sharon, is the current Israeli Prime Minister. He was received warmly in the UN in September, and was heralded as a man of peace!
The Massacre of Dawayma (October 29, 1948)
The testimony of a soldier who participated in the occupation of the Palestinian village of Dawayma (in Haifa sub-district) on October 29, 1948:
“... They killed between eighty to one hundred Arab men, women and children. To kill the children they (soldiers) fractured their heads with sticks. There was not one home without corpses. The men and women of the villages were pushed into houses without food or water. Then the saboteurs came to dynamite them.
One commander ordered a soldier to bring two women into a building he was about to blow up .... Another soldier prided himself upon having raped an Arab woman before shooting her to death. Another Arab woman with her newborn baby was made to clean the place for a couple of days, and then they shot her and the baby. Educated and well-mannered commanders who were considered "good guys" ... became base murderers, and this not in the storm of battle, but as a method of expulsion and extermination. The fewer the Arabs who remain, the better.” (Davar, June 9, 1979.)
The Massacre in the Village of Eilaboun (October 30, 1948)
The village was attacked on October 29, 1948 by Zionist forces, which clashed with a group of men from the Rescue Army who were present in the village. The Zionist forces managed to enter the town at five o'clock a.m. on October 30, after the Rescue Army fighters had withdrawn. The inhabitants were ordered to gather in the city square, and were then fired at randomly from all four directions.
The Massacre in Ba'na and Dair al-Asad (October 31, 1948)
Zionist forces surrounded the two towns of Ba'nah and Dair al-Asad, then overtook them on October 31, 1948 at 10:00 a.m. The forces' commander ordered the inhabitants of the two villages over loudspeakers to gather on the plain located between the two villages under guard by Zionist soldiers, then killed a group of young men in a way which was described by a UN observer as "brutal murder, since it took place without provocation or even an expression of anger on the part of the people."
The Massacre of Kibya (October 14, 1953)
The Massacre of Kibya on 14 October 1953, was a continuation of such brutal massacres as the King David Hotel, Semiramis Hotel and Deir Yassin. But it was also a watershed in a sinister grand design in military history - a deliberate turning of an entire officer corps into a cabal with shared personal guilt for vicious war crimes.
At 9.30 p.m., on Wednesday, 14 October 1953, Zahal troops attacked the border Jordanian village of Kibya, Northwest of Jerusalem. Seven hundred regular troops participated in the attack in which mortars, machine guns, rifles and explosives were used. Forty-two houses as well as the school and the mosque of the village were dynamited. Every man, woman and child found by the attackers was killed; all in all, seventy-five innocent villagers were murdered in cold blood that night.
In 1953, Ben-Gurion established the Zahal, designated as Commando Unit 101. This all-volunteer unit was responsible for the Kibya massacre and was given exemption from the rules of war as if the Geneva Convention never existed. The first and only commander of Commando Unit 101 was Ariel Sharon, the single person most responsible years later for the notorious Sabra and Shatila massacre in Beirut, Lebanon.
The Zionist Government at the time claimed that the Kibya Massacre was performed by “civilian Jewish settlers.” But the historical record shows that it was sanctioned by acting Prime Minister Moshe Sharrett, and was planned by Defense Minister Pinhas Lavon, the Chief of the General Staff Mordecai Maklef, and the Chief of Operations, General Moshe Dayan, in concert with vacationing Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion.
The Massacre in the Village of Qalqiliya (October 10, 1956)
The Zionist army and a number of settlers attacked Qalqiliya, located along the green line which divided the Arab lands occupied in 1948 from the West Bank. Those who took part in the attack included an army detachment and an artillery battalion, along with ten fighter aircraft.
The Zionist army strafed the village with artillery fire before storming it, the death toll of the massacre coming to more than 70.
The Massacre of Kafr Qasim (October 29, 1956)
Kol Haam came out on 19 December carrying on its front page the following detailed story of the Kafr Qasim massacre which was committed by the Zionist army against the Arabs in occupied Palestine and in which men, women and children were slaughtered in cold blood. Kol Haam published the story of the massacre under the title, "In This Way Were the 49 Inhabitants of Kafr Qasim Slaughtered". The following is a translation of selected texts:
Here are the details of the massacre in which 49 of the peaceful inhabitants of Kafr Qasim - all Arabs living in Israel - were slaughtered in cold blood. Another thirteen of these inhabitants also sustained serious injuries in this horrible massacre committed by the troops of the Israeli frontier guards.
On 29 October 1956, the day on which Israel launched its assault on Egypt, units of the Israeli frontier guards started at 4 p.m. what they called a tour of the Triangle Villages. They informed the Mukhtars and the rural councils that the curfew in those villages was from that day onwards to be observed from 5 p.m. instead of 6 p.m. as was the case before, and that the inhabitants were, therefore, requested to stay home as from that very instant.
The "Mukhtar" of Kafr Qasim promptly informed the unit officer that a large number of the villagers, whose work took them outside the village, knew nothing of this new curfew. The officer in charge replied that his soldiers would take care of these. The villagers who were home complied with the newly-imposed curfew and remained indoors. Meanwhile, the armed frontier guards posted themselves at the village gates. Before long, the villagers came into sight. The first to arrive was a group of four laborers, home-bound, on bicycles. Here is what one of these laborers, Abdullah Samir Bedir by name, said about the incident:
”We reached the village entrance at about 4:55 p.m. We were suddenly confronted by a frontier unit consisting of 12 men and an officer, all occupying an army truck…The soldiers started stepping down from the truck and the officer ordered us to line up. Then he shouted to his soldiers this order: 'Laktasour Otem,' which means 'Reap them!' The soldiers opened fire… Then I feigned death…Then I saw three laborers approaching on a small horse cart. The soldiers stopped the cart and killed all three of them. Soon after, the soldiers moved a few yards down the road, apparently to take up positions that would enable them to stop a new truckload of home-bound villagers, as well as a bunch of workers returning home on their bicycles. I seized this opportunity and moved as quickly as I could to the nearest house…(the truck) stopped while carrying thirteen olive pickers, all women and girls, and two male laborers and the driver. They were attacked by the same group of frontier guards, who pitilessly butchered all but one of them.”
The number of cars stopped by the soldiers of the frontier guards was three; the people in all three cars were ordered to descend and were shot by machine-gun fire, killing them instantly.
A fourth car, which was a little late in coming, met with better luck, for the driver, seeing the bodies scattered around, didn't heed the order to stop. He pressed the accelerator and thus managed to escape with his car. The soldiers, however, succeeded in shooting one of the passengers as the car sped by.
Later on, the examination of these bodies showed that the soldiers had mutilated them, smashing the heads and cutting open the abdomens of some of the wounded women to finish them off, The only survivors were those who for some time lay buried under the corpses of their comrades and thus had their bodies covered with the blood of these victims, giving the impression that they, too, were dead. Those were the only ones who lived to speak of the horrors of the massacre of Kafr Qasim.
The blood bath was not restricted to the entrance or outskirts, but was carried right into the village itself. Talal Shaker Eissa, aged 8, left his home to bring in a flock of goats. He had hardly stepped out of his home when he was murdered by a shot fired by one of the soldiers. When his father ran out to investigate, he was killed by another shot. The mother, dragging in his body, was then shot. Noura, the remaining child, followed the cries of agony coming from her parents, and was killed on the spot by a hail of bullets. The only survivor of the family, a frail and aged grandfather, hearing the horror and the sounds of death, succumbed to a heart attack and died.
Al-Aqsa Mosque Massacre I (October 8, 1990)
On Monday October 8, 1990, just before the mid-day prayers, a number of Zionist settlers attempted to place the foundation stone for a Jewish temple on the grounds of Al-Aqsa mosque. Palestinian worshippers present at the mosque rose to prevent the settlers from doing this. A few minutes later, the Zionist army, stationed within the sacred area, together with the settlers started firing at the worshippers, killing more than 21, injuring more than 50, and arresting more than 270.
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