Summary
The district’s most populous village south of Haifa, 5,000 people famous for their almonds — Tirat al-Lawz, ‘Tira of the almonds’ — bombarded by the Irgun from December 1947, its women and children bused to the West Bank under British ‘mediation’, and finally taken on 16 July 1948 in Operation Policeman, in Pappe’s account; today the Jewish development town Tirat Hacarmel stands on its site.
Details
- Tirat Haifa was called St Yohan de Tire in Crusader times, had a Muslim majority with a small Christian community, and in 1596 had no more than 286 inhabitants; by the end of the Second World War new stone and mud-brick houses were being built and its two schools renovated, and its economy rested on arable crops, vegetables, fruit, excellent spring water and tourism to the ruins of the monastery of St Brocardus (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.193).
- The Irgun bombarded it as early as December 1947, killing thirteen people, mainly children and the elderly, and a raiding party of twenty fired at an isolated house on the village edge (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.194).
- Between 23 April and 3 May 1948 every woman and child of Tirat Haifa was taken out of the village as part of the overall British ‘mediation’ effort that enabled the Jewish forces to cleanse the greater Haifa area unhampered; the women and children were transferred by buses to the West Bank while the men stayed behind (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.194).
- A unit of special forces, combined elite troops from several brigades, brought the village down on 16 July 1948; it was one of the first three of the six coastal villages south of Haifa to fall in Operation Policeman (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, PDF p.192-194).
Related pages
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Haifa, Irgun, Kfar Lam, Ayn Hawd