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Balad al-Shaykh

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aliases

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Summary

Palestinian village about ten kilometres east of Haifa, burial place of Izz al-Din al-Qassam, attacked on 31 December 1947 for three hours on orders to kill the largest possible number of men, leaving over sixty Palestinians dead, in Pappe’s account.

Details

  • The village was selected by the Hagana High Command, as part of the Consultancy, to test British vigilance by ransacking a whole village and massacring a large number of its inhabitants while the British were still responsible for law and order (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.87).

  • Local commander Haim Avinoam was ordered to ‘encircle the village, kill the largest possible number of men, damage property, but refrain from attacking women and children’; the attack on 31 December 1947 lasted three hours and left over sixty Palestinians dead, not all of them men (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.87).

  • At its next meeting the Consultancy decided the separation of men from women and children was an unnecessary complication for future operations (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.87).

  • Al-Qassam’s grave is one of the few remains of the village still extant today (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.87).

  • In Manna, after the 30 December 1947 oil-refinery events in Haifa — an Irgun bomb at the gate, then Arab workers’ retaliation killing a larger number of Jewish workers — a Palmach unit attacked Balad al-Shaykh after midnight of the new year from the east, with firearms and grenades, killing and wounding dozens of sleeping residents; many Arab refinery employees lived in the village and in the Hawwasa shanty town (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.56-57).

  • The attacks on the village and Hawwasa caused panic among Haifa’s Arabs; many workers returned to their Galilee villages in the first week of 1948, and Manna calls Balad al-Shaykh and Khisas part of a blueprint to terrorize Palestinians in the Jewish-state areas into leaving (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.57).

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Haifa, Izz al-Din al-Qassam, Consultancy

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