Safsaf massacre

The Safsaf massacre occurred on October 29, 1948, when Israeli brigades captured the village of Safsaf. The village was defended by the Arab Liberation Army's Second Yarmuk Battalion. About 50-70 people were killed by the Israelis.

The village was attacked during the evening of October 29 and a fierce battle lasted until 7 AM the next morning. The village defenders inflicted heavy casualties to the attackers.

Safsaf was the first village to fall in Operation Hiram.

The known details of the massacre come to us via several contemporary second-hand Zionist reports and via Arab oral history. Yosef Nachmani, a senior officer in the Haganah (and later the director of the Jewish National Fund in Eastern Galilee), recorded in his diary what he was told by Immanuel Friedman, a representative of the Minority Affairs ministry:

:In Safsaf, after ... the inhabitants had raised a white flag, the [soldiers] collected and separated the men and women, tied the hands of fifty-sixty fellahin [peasants] and shot and killed them and buried them in a pit. Also, they raped several women... (quoted in Zertal, 2005, p. 171; see also Morris, 2004, p. 500).

Moshe Erem reported on the massacre to a meeting of the Mapam Political Committee but his words were censored from the minutes. According to the notes taken by another person present, Erem spoke of:

:Safsaf 52 men tied together with a rope. Pushed down a well and shot. 10 killed. Women pleaded for mercy. 3 cases of rape . . . . A girl of 14 raped. Another four killed (Morris, 2004, p. 500).

These accounts in broad detail are supported by Arab witnesses who told their stories to historians. According to Nafez Nazzal, witnesses spoke of four rapes and the murder of about 70 men. After the massacre, the remainder of the village fled to Lebanon.

At least two internal inquiries into the massacre were initiated during 1948-9 by the IDF, but their reports remain classified and unavailable.

See also

* List of massacres committed during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war

External links and references

* [http://palestineremembered.com/Safad/Safsaf/Story1162.html Oral History interview with Mohammad Abdallah Edghaim]
* [http://www.abunimah.org/features/010713shatila.html Abu Ismail's eyewitness account]
* [http://www.iap.org/articles/safsaf.htm Mohammad Abdallah Edghaim's eyewintess account]
* Morris, Benny (1995). Falsifying the record: a fresh look at Zionist documentation of 1948, "Journal of Palestine Studies", 24: 44-62.
* Morris, Benny (2004). "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited". Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-00967-7.
* N. Nazzal, "The Palestinian Exodus from Galilee", 1948. Inst. Pal. Studies, 1978.
* Zertal, Idith (2005). "Israel's Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood". Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-85096-7.