Zionism
Zionism: A black historical record |
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The Massacre at Baldat al-Shaikh (Dec. 31, 1947) As the world was preparing to usher in a new year AD, Hagana gang members stormed the village of Baldat al-Shaikh (referred to by the Zionists today as Tell Ghanan) in pursuit of unarmed citizens. This Zionist-led crime led to the deaths of numerous women and children, the death toll coming to approximately 600 people, most of whose corpses were found inside the houses of the village.
The Massacre at Sa'sa' in Hebron (the night of Feb. 14-15, 1948) The Zionists attacked the village at midnight, exploding 20 houses with the unarmed citizens who had fled into them for refuge still inside. Most of the victims were women and children.
The Massacre at Abu Kasr (March 31, 1948) This massacre was carried out by terrorists from the Hagana gang, which subsequently become the nucleus of the Zionist Army. The massacre occurred during an armed attack and a series of explosion operations. The Zionist terrorists pursued the unarmed citizens inhabiting the village as they attempted to flee from their homes.
The Massacre at Dair Yasin (April 10, 1948) The Zionist gangs Stern, Irgun and Hagana raided the Arab village of Dair Yasin at 2:00 a.m. According to eyewitnesses, the terrorist members of the Zionist gangs began killing everyone within shooting range. After this they began throwing bombs inside the houses to destroy them along with everyone in them, since they had received orders to destroy all the homes in the village. As the houses were being bombed, terrorists from Irgun and Stern followed behind those throwing the explosives, killing everyone who remained alive inside the demolished houses. The Zionist massacre continued until the afternoon of the same day. Before withdrawing from the village, the terrorists gathered together everyone from the village who remained alive and executed them, including elderly people, women and young children. In describing the massacre, eyewitnesses recounted that "a bride and groom at their final wedding celebration were the first victims. First they were thrown down along with thirty-three of their neighbors, then they were stood up against a wall and pelted with machine-gun fire with their hands tied." Fahmi Zaydan, the only person in his family to survive the massacre, was twelve years old at the time. He recounts what happened to the rest of his family, saying, "The Jews ordered everybody in my family to stand up with their faces to the wall. Then they started opening fire on us. I was wounded in my side. Most of us kids managed to survive because we hid behind our families. But a bullet shattered the head of my sister Qadriya, who was four years old, and everybody else who was standing along the wall was killed, too: my mother and father, my grandmother and grandfather, my maternal aunts and uncles, and some of their kids." According to Halima Id, who was thirty years old at the time of the massacre and from one of the largest families in Dair Yasin, "I saw a Jew shoot my brother's wife, Khaldiya, in the neck. She was about to give birth. Then he slashed her stomach open with a butcher knife. And when one of the women tried to get the baby out of the dead mother's womb, they killed her too. Her name was Aisha Radwan." In another house, Hanna Khalil (16 years old at the time) saw a Jewish terrorist unsheathe a large knife and use it to slit open the body of her neighbor, Jamila Habash, from head to toe. Then he killed another neighbor belonging to a family by the name of Fathi in the same manner on the doorstep of the same house. The same sorts of atrocities were repeated in one house after another. And according to details obtained from survivors, female Jews belonging to the organizations Layhi and Etsel also took part in the massacre. Jacque de Renee, head of the Red Cross mission in Palestine in 1948, described the terrorists who carried out the massacre at Dair Yasin saying, "They were young men and teenagers, male and female, bristling with arms (pistols, machine guns and hand grenades). [When I saw them], most of them were still spattered with blood, with huge daggers in their hands. A girl from one of the Jewish gangs whose eyes looked as though they were still full of the crime, held out her hands still dripping with blood, swinging them back and forth as they were some sort of war medal." He adds, "I went into one house and found it full of shattered furniture and splinters of all sorts . .. When I was about to leave the place I heard the sound of moaning and sighing. As I looked for the source of the sound, I stumbled upon a small, warm foot. It belonged to a ten-year-old girl who had been maimed by a hand grenade, but who was still alive. When I began to pick her up, an Israeli officer tried to prevent me, but I pushed him out of the way! Then I continued my work. No one had been left alive except for two women, one of them an elderly woman who had hidden behind a pile of firewood. Of the 400 inhabitants of the village, forty escaped. The rest were slaughtered, indiscriminately and in cold blood." Menachem Begin, former Prime Minister of the Zionist entity, boasts about this massacre in a book of his, where he writes, "This operation had tremendous, unanticipated results. After hearing the news of Dair Yasin, the Arabs were panic-stricken and began fleeing in terror. Out of a total of 800,000 Arabs who had been living in the land of present-day Israel (the Palestinian territories which were occupied in 1948), only 165,000 remained." And Begin finds fault with Jewish leaders who declared themselves innocent of the massacre, accusing them of hypocrisy! Begin goes on to say that the massacre at Dair Yasin "brought about decisive victories on the battle field." Other terrorists have said that "without Dair Yasin, it would not have been possible for Israel to come into existence." As for '[the terrorist gangs] Etsel and Layhi, they continued to defend the massacre. In fact, Layhi considered what its members had done at Dair Yasin "a humanitarian duty".
The Massacre at Abu Shousha (May 14, 1948) The massacre in the village of Abu Shousha, not far from Dair Yasin, began at dawn. It resulted in fifty victims, including men and women, elderly and very young, many of whom had had their heads beaten with axes. The soldiers of the Zionist Jaf'ati brigade which carried out the massacre opened fire indiscriminately on everything that moved. Not even the livestock survived the massacre.
The Massacre at Lid (July 11, 1948) This massacre was carried out by a commando unit led by terrorist Moshe Dayan. The unit stormed the city in the evening amidst a torrent of artillery shells and heavy gun fire directed at everything that moved in the city streets. The Arab citizens took refuge from the attack in the Dahmash Mosque. But no sooner had the Zionist terrorists reached the mosque than they killed 176 civilians who took refuge to the mosque raising the victims of the Zionist massacre to 426 Palestinians. Once the slaughter had come to an end, the unarmed civilians were led to the city's sports stadium, where the young men were detained. Then the families were given a mere half-hour to leave the city for the area where the Jordanian Army was located. They were to go there on foot and without food or water, which caused the deaths of many women, children and elderly people.
The Massacre in the Village of Eilaboun (October 30, 1948) The village was attacked on October 29, 1948 by Israeli forces, which clashed with a group of men from the Rescue Army who were present in the village. The Israeli forces managed to enter the town at five o'clock a.m. on October 30, after the Rescue Army fighters had withdrawn. The inhabitants were ordered to gather in the city square, and were then fired at randomly from all four directions.
The Massacre in Ba'na and Dair al-Asad (October 31, 1948) Zionist forces surrounded the two towns of Ba'nah and Dair al-Asad, then overtook them on October 31, 1948 at 10:00 a.m. The forces' commander ordered the inhabitants of the two villages over loudspeakers to gather on the plain located between the two villages under guard by Zionist soldiers, then killed a group of young men in a way which was described by a UN observer as "brutal murder, since it took place without provocation or even an expression of anger on the part of the people."
The Massacre at Qibya (October 14, 1953) After intensive artillery fire aimed at residences in the village, units from the standing army of the Zionist entity surrounded Qibya with a force of approximately 600 soldiers, after which they stormed the village, firing in all directions. While one unit of the Zionist infantrymen pursued the people of the village, firing at them all the while, other Zionist units placed explosives around some of the homes and blew them up with their residents still inside. According to eye-witnesses who survived the massacre, Zionist soldiers stationed themselves outside the houses while preparations were being made to blow them up and fired on anyone who tried to flee. The brutal massacre continued until 4:00 . The fatalities from the massacre numbered 67, including men, women and children, while hundreds of others were injured. The massacre was followed by scenes of the type one finds it difficult to forget. Among these was the sight of a woman sitting on top of a pile of debris and looking forlornly into the sky. At the same time, one could see small hands and legs which were the remains of her six children, while her husband's bullet-mangled corpse lay in the road in front of her. In his report to the meeting of the International Security Council on October 27, 1953, General Von Pinika, chief UN observer at that time, stated that "the attack had been planned, and was carried out by the regular Israeli forces."
The Massacre in the Village of Qalqiliya (October 10, 1956) The Zionist army and a number of settlers attacked Qalqiliya, located along the green line which divided the Arab lands occupied in 1948 from the West Bank. Those who took part in the attack included an army detachment and an artillery battalion, along with ten fighter aircraft. The Zionist army strafed the village with artillery fire before storming it, the death toll of the massacre coming to more than 70.
The Massacre at Kufr Qasim (October 29, 1956) Zionist terrorist forces imposed a curfew on the village of Kufr Qasim, after which a number of children and elderly people took off to inform the young men who were working in the fields outside the village about the curfew. However, the forces stationed outside the village killed them in cold blood, murdering the young men before they could reach the village. The death toll for this Zionist massacre came to 49 civilians, including a number of children and elderly people.
The Massacre at Khan Younis (November 3, 1956) The Zionist army carried out this massacre against Palestinians in the Khan Younis refugee camp in south Gaza. The result was the deaths of 250 Palestinians. Nine days after the first massacre (on November 12, 1956), a unit of the Zionist army carried out another massacre in which more than 275 civilians were killed in the same camp. The Zionist terrorists also killed more than hundred more Palestinians in the Rafah refugee camp on the same day.
The Massacre at Sabra and Shatila (September 18, 1982) A plan had been laid to storm the Sabra and Shatila camps for Palestinian refugees in the Beirut area since the first day of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Its purpose was to weaken the Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut and force the Palestinians to emigrate outside Lebanon. Before sundown on Thursday, September 16, 1982, the storming of the camps began. As for the massacre itself, which was carried out by the Lebanese kata'ib (Falangist) militia and Zionist occupation soldiers, it continued for approximately 36 hours. During the operation, the Israeli army surrounded the camps, preventing anyone from entering or leaving. In addition, the occupation soldiers set off incandescent bombs by night to facilitate the militia's mission. The Zionist soldiers also provided other logistical services to the Maronite militiamen during the massacre. Information about the massacre began to leak out after a number of children and women fled to the Gaza hospital in the Shatila camp, where they informed doctors of what was happening. News of the massacre likewise reached some foreign journalists on Friday morning, September 17, 1982. The bloodletting went on until noon on Saturday, September 18. Approximately 3,500 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians were killed, most of them women, children and elderly people. The massacre was carried out under the leadership of Ariel Sharon, who headed the Special Unit "101" in the Israeli army at that time. It was carried out under the slogan "without sentiment - may God have mercy", while the password was "green", meaning that the way to bloodshed is open! However, the military court which was formed to investigate the massacre considered "that the General's commands were misunderstood", after which he was fined an equivalent of 10 piasters, or 14 American cents, and was reprimanded by the military court. The verdict was referred to as "the shadmi piaster" for its preposterousness and contempt for the meaning of justice. Umm Ghazi Younis Madhi, one of the survivors of the massacre, says, "they stormed the camp at 5:30 on September 16. We didn't hear any gunfire at first, since they were killing people with axes and knives. They would bury the people alive with bulldozers. We ran away barefoot with bullets on our heels. They slaughtered my husband and three of my children in the massacre. They killed my husband in the bedroom with one of the children. And they burned . . . Umm Mahmoud, Umm Ghazi's neighbor, tells of what she saw saying, "I saw them slaughtering a pregnant girl with her husband. My niece came out of the house and they grabbed her and slaughtered her in the street. They did the same thing to her small son, who was in her arms." Ghalib Sa'id, also one of the survivors, says, "Artillery shells were fired on the camp first. People were being killed with weapons fitted out with silencers, and they were using axes and swords. They killed my brother and my four children. And several girls were violated as well." As for Munir Ahmad al-Doukhi, who at the time was 13 years old, he survived three attempts on his life. He says, "I'd had been placed under the responsibility of armed men wearing filthy clothes, and who didn't speak Arabic well. With me was a group of women and children who had been dragged out of their houses. They fired on the women and children, and I was injured in my right foot. My mother was wounded in her shoulder and in her leg. When they asked the wounded to stand up so that they could take them to the hospital, I pretended to be dead. Then they fired on them all over again. So that's how I survived the second attempt to kill me. But my mother had already died. And on the morning of the next day, they shot at me when they found out that I was still alive. They wounded me and thought I was dead, so they left me alone." Sunaya Qasim Bashir says, "My husband and my son were killed in the massacre. The most horrible sight I saw was the sight of our neighbor, Hajja Munira Amru. First they slaughtered her four-month-old nursing child before her very eyes, then they slaughtered her." An American nurse by the name of Jill Drew tells of an eyewitness who said that they tied up the children, then slaughtered them like so many sheep in the Sabra and Shatila camps. They would line people up in the sports stadium, then form firing squads to shoot them dead. Ali Khalil Afana, who was 12 years old at the time, says, "It was 11:30. We heard the sound of a big explosion. It was followed by a woman's voice, then all of a sudden they broke into our house. They came rushing in on us like wolves, searching the rooms. My mother screamed for help, and they rained her with bullets. My father reached out his hand in search of something to defend himself with. But their bullets were too fast for him. I didn't have enough strength to scream, since they'd fallen on me with knives. I don't know what happened after that. But I found myself in the hospital the way you see me now: with my head and my legs all wrapped up. A classmate of mine who was visiting his mother in the hospital told me that our house was nothing but a pile of rubble. My aunt came to visit me yesterday, so I asked her what had happened to my three brothers. But she didn't answer me! They're all dead. I know it." And with that, hot tears rolled down his little cheeks. A woman from Sabra camp tells her story by saying "I, my husband, and my baby, were about to sleep on 15 September at night, after we'd finished straightening up the things that had been destroyed by the bombing. At that time we were feeling reassured because the Lebanese - or so we thought - were surrounding the camp. But the horrors were approaching, because [not long after this] scores of soldiers and fighters came in shooting and blowing up the houses. We went out to see what was going on, and when we saw what we saw, we tried to run away. But they stopped us. They pushed my husband, my father and my brother toward a wall and stood them up with their backs to it. Then they made them raise their hands and showered them with a torrent of bullets, and they fell down dead. When my mother and I screamed, they pulled us by the hair toward a deep hole that had been caused by a missile. But just then they received orders to move somewhere else, so they left without firing on us. Then we fled." Another woman speaks of how they came into her house when a neighbor boy was visiting her. They fell upon him with an ax and split his head in two. She says, "When I screamed, they tied me up with a rope that they had with them. Then they threw me onto the floor and three of them took turns raping me. By the time they left I was unconscious, and when I finally woke up, I was in a civil defense ambulance." Some militiamen would crush Palestinians to death under the wheels of their military vehicles. And at the same time they would make the sign of the cross over bodies of the victims. A Danish television cameraman by the name of Pederson filmed a number of army trucks filled with women, children and elderly people, headed toward some unknown destination. People in Sabra and Shatila were killed indiscriminately, and a large number of women were raped. There were many people who raised white flags as a sign of surrender, especially children and women. However, they were among the first victims of the massacre. Among them were more than fifty women who went to surrender, but who were all killed.
The attack on the Akka hospital took
place on Friday morning at 11:30. It involved the murder of doctors and
patients. A Palestinian nurse by the name of Intisar Isma'il (19 years
old) whose disfigured corpse was found later, was raped ten times, then
killed. The attackers killed many sick and wounded, as well as some of
the hospital workers and local residents who had come to the hospital
for refuge. Then they forced forty patients to get into trucks. They
were not seen again. During the massacre, the terrorists killed
physicians Ali Uthman and Samiya al-Khatib inside the hospital. And they
emptied their cartridges into the head of a fourteen-year-old wounded
boy named Muwaffaq As'ad as he lay in bed. Roberto Soro, a Beirut correspondent for the American newspaper Time relates what he saw after entering the camps. He says, "There was nothing but piles of debris and corpses. The bodies were piled on top of one another, including children, women and men. Some of them had been shot in the head, and some of them had had their heads cut off. Some of them had their hands tied behind them, and some of them had their hands tied to their legs. Parts of some heads had flown off in different directions, and there was the body of a woman holding her child to her bosom; both of them had been killed by the same bullet. The bodies had been removed from one place to another with Israeli bulldozers. One woman stood over a maimed corpse screaming, "My husband! Oh Lord, who will help me now? And all of my children have been killed! My husband, they've slaughtered him! What will I do? Oh Lord, Oh Lord!" In a report submitted by a Washington Post correspondent, he speaks of what he saw saying, "Entire houses had been destroyed by bulldozers, turned into piles of bodies atop more bodies as if they were so many dolls. And over the corpses, the holes which appeared in the walls of the houses indicated that they had been shot to death. On a short dead-end street we came across two girls, one of them about 11 years old and the other only a few months!!! They were both lying on the ground with their legs tied up, and there was a small hole in each one's head. A few steps away from them, on the wall of a house bearing the numbers 422 and 424, they had fired on eight men. Every street, no matter how small, had its story to tell. On one street there were sixteen corpses piled on top of each other in peculiar positions, and nearby there lay a 40-year-old woman with a bullet between her breasts. Near a small shop an elderly man about 70 years old had fallen, with his hand still extended in a gesture as if to plead for mercy.
His dust-covered head looked toward a
woman now beneath the rubble." . . . the fruit vendor where my family lives after our house in the Sabra and Shatila camp was destroyed by Israeli shelling at the beginning of the invasion. It was there that I first heard about the massacre." Then he continues, saying, "I met up with a British journalist who asked me to go with him to the camp entrance on Saturday morning, September 17, 1982 so that he could record the events of the massacre with his camera. I agreed to go with him. When we got to the western end of the camp, we were surprised to find a pile of corpses near the al-Doukhi shop. The shop owner had been beaten on the head with an ax, and beside him there was a young man. All the rest were elderly people. We kept on going until we reached the Haraj crossroads, where the journalist saw nine corpses under a truck. Some of them had their hands tied, and bullets had penetrated the surface of a nearby wall. The scene indicated that they had been subjected to a mass execution. About ten meters from this appalling sight, we found an elderly woman holding a Lebanese identity card. It appeared that she had been trying to convince her killers that she was Lebanese and not Palestinian. And twenty meters further on, we found a number of horses that had been killed, among them the corpse of a man with his head cut off. It turned out later to be my uncle, Abdul Hadi Hashim, 49 . After we'd gone a little farther we came upon six cadavers that had been tied together with chains. The heads of two of them looked as though they had been hollowed out, as if they had been beaten with an axes. We were so at a loss and overcome with horror, we decided to go back the way we'd come. By this time the British journalist had taken scores of photos of these scenes. Meanwhile we heard a sound nearby. The journalist became distraught and hurried to get us out of the camp on the motorcycle we'd come in on. As we were leaving sprays of bullets were fired at us, which made him drive all the faster." Recalling memories from inside the camp, the eyewitness goes on, saying, "We saw cadavers piled up in a corner to our right, only fifty yards from the entrance to the Shatila camp. There were more than twelve bodies of young men whose feet and hands had been tied around each other, and they were still in the throes of death. Every one of them had received a bullet near his temple that had gone through his brain. On the right side of the necks of some of them there were bright red and black scars. I saw a little girl no more than three years old who'd been thrown into the road as though she were some doll someone had thrown away. Her white dress was spattered with mud, blood and dirt, and a bullet had blown away the back of her head.
"When the armed men stormed the camp,
families had gone to sleep and were in their bedrooms. I saw bodies
lying on the floors or piled under chairs. And it appeared that many
women had been raped, since their clothes were found strewn on the
ground. I saw a mother holding her little boy, both of them with bullets
through their heads, naked women whose hands had been bound behind their
backs, a suckling child with a shattered head and floating . . . a
suckling child, and they lined them up carefully in a circle, placing
the head in the middle. At Sabra and Shatila the prevailing impression
is that the killers deliberately aimed to kill children in particular." Three thousand two hundred ninety-seven (3,297) men, women and children (out of a total of 20,000 residents in the camps at the beginning of the massacre) were killed within forty hours, between September 16-18, 1982. Among the dead bodies, 136 Lebanese were found; 1,800 victims were killed in the streets and alleys of the camp, while 1,097 were killed in the Gaza Hospital and 400 others in the Akka Hospital. Commenting on the massacre, Menachem Begin described the Palestinian resistance fighters to the Israeli Knesset as "animals that walk on two legs". And after the announcement of the news of the massacre, an officer of the Lebanese kata'ib forces stated that "the swords and rifles of the Christians will stalk the Palestinians wherever they go. And ultimately, we'll do away with them."
Another kata'ib officer stated to an
American journalist, "We've waited long years to be able to storm the
camps of West Beirut. The Israelis chose us because we're better than
they are at this sort of 'house to house' operation." And when the
journalist asked him if they had taken prisoners, he replied, "These
operations aren't the kind in which prisoners are taken."
The Massacre at 'Uyun Qarrah (May 20, 1990) 'Uyun Qarrah is located near Tel Aviv, and this massacre resulted in seven deaths, all of the victims Palestinian workers who had attempted to go to their places of work inside the "green line". A Zionist soldier by the name of `Ami Bouber gathered a number of Arabs near a wall in the city, then opened fire on them with his military weapon.
The Massacre at al-Aqsa Mosque (October 8, 1990) On Monday, October 8, 1990 immediately before the noon prayer, Jewish extremists belonging to what is called . . Jerusalem residents rushed to try to prevent the Zionist extremists from desecrating the mosque, which led to clashes between the Zionist extremists led by terrorist Ghershoun Salmoun, leader of the "Temple Mount Trustees", and approximately 5,000 Palestinians who had come to the mosque to pray. Only moments after the worshippers had come in, Zionist border guard soldiers stationed heavily inside the mosque precincts began firing indiscriminately on the Muslim worshippers. The attack led to 21 deaths and wounded 150 others; while 270 people were trapped inside and outside the precincts of the sacred mosque.
The Massacre at the Ibrahami Mosque (February 25, 1994) Before worshippers had completed the dawn prayer in the Ibrahami Mosque in Hebron, the blast of hand grenades exploding and the sound of bullet spray filled the mosque. Bullets and splinters from the grenades pierced the heads, necks and backs of the worshippers, wounding more than 350. The crime began when terrorist Baroukh Goldstein and a group of Jewish settlers from the Kiryat Arba settlement entered the mosque. Goldstein was carrying his military machine gun and hand grenades along with large amounts of ammunition. He stood behind one of the pillars in the mosque and waited until the worshippers had prostrated, then opened machine gun fire on them. Meanwhile, others helped him load the ammunition, which included the internationally banned explosive damdam lead . Goldstein carried out the massacre at a time when Zionist soldiers had closed the mosque doors to prevent worshippers from fleeing. They also prevented those coming from outside the mosque precincts from coming in to rescue the wounded. Later, others were shot to death by occupation soldiers outside the mosque and at the cemetery during the funeral processions of those who had been martyred in the mosque. The massacre led to fifty deaths, twenty-nine of which occurred inside the mosque.
The Massacre at Qana (April, 1996) In April, 1996, Zionist enemy forces undertook to escalate their acts of aggression against Arab population centers in south Lebanon, and enemy aircraft launched raids against villages, towns and camps in south Lebanon under the pretext of fighting against the Lebanese resistance forces, in particular, the Hizbollah organization. On Thursday 18 April, 1996, the Israeli artillery and helicopters shelled a shelter inside the Fijian battalion working within the UN forces in south Lebanon, using bombs which explode in the air in order to increase casualties among the ranks of civilians who might try to seek refuge in shelters. The operation led to the deaths of 160 civilians, most of them women, children and the elderly who were unable to flee toward Beirut and were thus obliged to seek refuge in the [shelter at the] Fijian Battalion headquarters in the Lebanese village of Qana. An unbiased report made by UN investigators, which was published despite both Zionist and American disapproval, affirmed that Israeli aircraft deliberately targeted the shelter, designed as it was to protect those who had fled to it. Moreover, the report - which aroused a furor at the time it was released - denied that the Zionists had been the subject of bomb attacks by resistance fighters around the shelter.
In September, 1996, the Zionist enemy government opened up a tunnel parallel to the southern wall of the Aqsa Mosque, a move which Palestinians saw as a step toward carrying out a Zionist plan to destroy the mosque by exposing its foundations. Violent clashes broke out between Palestinian demonstrators and occupation soldiers between September 25-27, 1996, during which time approximately 70 Palestinians were shot to death by occupation soldiers who opened fire on the demonstrators from helicopters
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