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Beersheba

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aliasesBersheba, Bir al-Saba

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Summary

Southern town of 5,000 inhabitants occupied on 21 October 1948 in Operation ‘Python’, in Pappe’s account; its people were driven out at gunpoint to Hebron, and by December 1948 the depopulation of its district was completed, leaving ninety per cent of the region’s people gone.

Details

  • Beersheba was protected mainly by Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood volunteers under the Libyan officer Ramadan al-Sanusi (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.229).
  • Habib Jarada, who today lives in Gaza city, remembered the people of Beersheba being driven out at gunpoint to Hebron, and the town’s mayor beseeching the occupying officer not to deport the people; the blunt answer was: ‘We need land, not slaves’ (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.229).
  • When the fighting was over, the captive soldiers and all local people the Israeli troops suspected of holding arms were rounded up and randomly fired at; Jarada was taken to a prison camp and released only in the summer of 1949 in a prisoner exchange following Israel’s armistice with Jordan (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.229).
  • In December 1948 the Israeli units completed the depopulation of the Beersheba (printed also Bersheba) district started in the autumn of 1948; ninety per cent of the people who had lived for centuries in this, the most southern inhabited region of Palestine, were gone (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.228-229).
  • The Beersheba mosque was turned into a shop by the Israelis (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.253).
  • Sitta’s register dates the town of Beersheba’s depopulation 20-10-48 and gives its Arab Population 48 as 6,461 on 3,890 dunums, with a Massacres M mark (The Palestinian Nakba 1948 — The Register of Depopulated Localities in Palestine, PDF p.5); Pappe gives the occupation on 21 October 1948 and a population of 5,000 — the two accounts differ by a day and by the population figure, and both are kept as printed. The register’s Beersheba district subtotal, which includes its Bedouin tribal sections, is 90,507 people on 12,577,000 dunums (The Palestinian Nakba 1948 — The Register of Depopulated Localities in Palestine, PDF p.7).

The Palestinian Nakba 1948 — The Register of Depopulated Localities in Palestine, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Dawaymeh, Gaza

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