Summary
The ‘innocent-sounding’ codename, in Pappe’s phrase, for the July 1948 attack on the two Palestinian towns of Lydd and Ramla, halfway between Jaffa and Jerusalem, commanded by Yigal Allon with Yitzhak Rabin as his second in command; the towns’ populations were expelled on a forced march to the West Bank between the two truces.
Details
- Ben-Gurion appointed Yigal Allon commander of the attack on 10 July 1948 and Yitzhak Rabin his second in command (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.199).
- Both towns lay clearly within the designated Arab state, and their residents and defenders assumed the Arab Legion would resist their occupation by force; instead the Legion units stationed near Lydd were instructed by John Glubb to withdraw (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.199-200).
- Lydd was bombarded from the air, the first city attacked in this way, then attacked directly; the men who surrendered from the Dahamish Mosque were massacred inside it, and about 50,000 people were marched out of the city on 14 July (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.199-200).
- Ramla was occupied after Lydd despite its notables’ agreement that its people could stay; 3,000 people were rounded up to a prison camp and the town looted, and the people of both cities were forced to march without food and water to the West Bank, many dying of thirst and hunger on the way (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.202).
- Pappe gives the two towns’ expelled as altogether 70,000 people in the between-truces overview, and Rabin’s estimate of 50,000 ‘transferred’ from both towns; the figures are recorded as printed on the source page under Open questions (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.189, p.202).
Related pages
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Lydd, Ramla, Yigal Allon, Yitzhak Rabin