Summary
Galilee village in al-Shaghur whose inhabitants surrendered to a unit from the west on 30 October 1948, were then fired on, expelled toward Lebanon by a second unit from the east, and were allowed to return two to three days later, in Manna’s account, confirmed in its details by a 1951 ruling of the Supreme Court in Jerusalem (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.90-91).
Details
- Soldiers of the unit that entered Nahaf ordered the inhabitants to assemble on a threshing floor, chose two young men and shot them in front of the villagers, and ordered the rest to leave north to Lebanon; on the mountain trek the expelled were offered food and water by neighbouring Druze villages, and the distance from the soldiers encouraged some to return, later joined by others (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.90).
- An eyewitness of the Qadiri family (Abu Shawkat), watching from a cave above the village, saw and heard the soldiers open fire on four men of Nahaf and expel the others with shots in the air (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.90-91). The two accounts’ numbers for the men fired on — two chosen and shot, in the village account, four in the eyewitness and court accounts — stand as each is printed.
- The 1951 Supreme Court ruling states: “The rest of the villagers were ordered to leave their village and go north to Lebanon and refugees from Sha’b who had taken refuge in the village left with them.” The mukhtar, Hamad Ahmad ‘Abdullah (Abu ‘Awad), who had gone to Yarka to the Ma’di family with help from two residents of Julis, contacted the army authorities, who allowed the inhabitants to return two to three days after the expulsion, and they came back in small groups (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.91).
- Nahaf still stood at the end of 1948 among the al-Shaghur villages that remained, from al-Rama to Majd al-Krum (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.93, 101).
Related pages
Nakba and Survival, Majd al-Krum, Al-Rama, Druze, Operation Hiram