Summary
Wadi Ara village in the The Triangle where, on 23 June 1952, soldiers set a trap near the border and fired without warning on villagers who had come, as customarily on Eid al-Fitr, to see relatives on the Jordanian side — killing two and wounding five, an incident Manna treats as a small-scale rehearsal of the circumstances of the Kafr Kassim massacre (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.211-212).
Details
- On 21 June 1952, the first day of Eid al-Fitr, the people of Wadi ‘Ara prepared to meet their relatives from the Jordanian side near ‘Ayn al-Sahla as usual; an army observer force kept them from the border on 22 June, then left at noon; on the morning of 23 June soldiers returned, set a trap, and at 8:30 opened fire on dozens of villagers — men, women and children — killing two and wounding five, including an elderly man and two eleven-year-old children (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.211-212).
- Mapam MK Hanan Rubin demanded the officer who ordered the fire be tried; MKs Rustum Bastuni and Mordechai Bentov visited to offer condolences over the soldiers’ objection; an investigating committee reported to the foreign-affairs and security ministries, and Ben-Gurion announced the soldiers were guilty of no criminal offense, just an unpremeditated error (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.212).
- Attorney Elias Kusa rebutted the official framing in a letter: in the ‘Ara case there were no “infiltrators, just citizens who came close to the border from the Israeli side so that they could see their relatives.” (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.212).
Related pages
Nakba and Survival, Wadi Ara, The Triangle, Elias Kusa, Kafr Kassim