On the night of May 23, 1948, eight days after the British ended their mandate on Palestine, a detachment of Israeli troops perpetrated one of their most heinous crimes against innocent Palestinian civilians in the Palestinian village of Tantora 30 kms south the city of Haifa.
As per their other massacres, this was planned to instill fear among the Palestinian population in the village and the surrounding areas to make Palestinians flee their homes and leave their homeland. Those people are now the Palestinian refugees.
On the night of May 23, the population of the village were rounded up, most of them blind folded and hand cuffed, were forced to line up, and group by group were lead aside and shot dead in cold blood. The killers are Jewish soldiers trained purposely to kill innocent civilians.
Fifty two years on, an Israeli researcher (Theodore Katz) uncovered this massacre by obtaining verbal testimonies on its details from men and women who were witnesses and survived what happened that night. Katz based his findings also on testimonies from those killers who participated in committing the crime.
Katz summarized his findings comprising the affidavits of living witnesses and his own conclusions in a thesis presented to Haifa University for which he obtained a Master degree.
Without going into further details, we bring you the reader, the original testimonies narrating the events of that horrible night.
The Devils of Death
74-year old Fawzi M. Tanji described the massacre in the following words:
“Israeli soldiers drove us to the cemetery of the village where they ordered us to line in queues. Their commander shouted angrily: “Take ten”. Ten were chosen from the line and were led to a nearby grove where they were shot dead. The soldiers returned and drove another group of ten persons to remove the bodies of those killed. This scene was repeated again and again. The Jewish soldiers fired their bullets against more and more people in the same way. Tanji adds: I will never forget the faces of the killers. To me they are the devils of death.
While standing there, I was confident that these were the last moments in my life and that they will come at any time to shoot me… The Jews did not learn the lesson from the Nazis who perpetrated the same crime against them. I still do not know why they are using the same method used by the Nazis against us? With tears flooding from his eyes, the old man now residing in Tulkarm refugee camp, continues: I preferred to have been killed there in Tantora without carrying this story till this day. I still remember when they amassed us near the seashore in two groups, one for men and another for women. The first group included children who were 12 years old and above, children under 12 were put with the women’s group. After that seven, perhaps ten men were chosen from the group and were led to a place not far away from the village mosque, all were killed. The soldiers returned and took another group, a third, a fourth …. till the number of the victims reached around 90. The Israeli soldiers escorted this caravan of death. Elder people and children watched the scene. After that they drove the remaining people to the cemetery and were about to kill them. At this critical moment about fifty or sixty Jews from Zichron Ya’acov settlement arrived in and saw what was going on. At this point a number of senior officials from the new arrivals intervened to stop the massacre. They shouted: “That is enough.”
Murdered Mothers
Rizk Ashmawi, who resides today in Al-Fridis village in upper Galilee was 13 years old on the day of the Tantora massacre.
Ashmawi who recalls the events says: “Not far away from the Mosque there was a courtyard where youngsters were lined up against the walls … there was a queue of about 25 men … and a second line of women behind, opposite the two stood about ten or twelve soldiers.
A short while later, the soldiers started shooting the men, the women were ordered to leave . Ashmawi recalls: “At the time of shooting, a soldier stopped me till the end of firing and then I left with other children to the sea shore, when we returned, we passed by the bodies of the victims, and I saw a second group made up of approximately 40 – 50 people standing against walls. The soldiers opened fire against them as before. At the time of waiting while the soldiers were aiming their rifles against us, anguished mothers rushed towards us making a human shield to protect their sons and preventing the soldiers from shooting.
One child asked for help from his mother but the soldiers opened fire and killed her. My mother too was about to be killed on that black day. When we left the seashore to the cemetery something terrible happened to my mother, She was so frightened, she could not move one of her legs, she was unable to walk… we tried in vain to help her and begged the soldiers to have mercy on us, they said, there is no mercy, we are going to kill her and will relieve you from carrying her.
I noticed an argument among the soldiers, the life of my mother was saved by one of the soldiers. The massacre left more than 90 Palestinian killed, they were buried in three ditches two for men, and one for women.
Ashmawi still recalls the body of a man lying across the road and how his wife and daughters were wailing when a soldier was about to kill the wife and her daughters. The wife was trying to move her dead husband’s body away from the strong sunlight.
Hugging the Dead
Maj. Gen. Abdulrazaq el-Yahya, a senior Palestinian military officer, was born in Tantora village but was living in Syria when the massacre occurred. He heard the news of the massacre from his brothers and quoted them as saying: “They assembled all men in the cemetery of the village and started to take them in groups each consisting of between six to seven people. Each group was forced to dig a hole in the ground… when they finished, the soldiers shot them and they fill into the hole they had dug.
After this, Jewish soldiers moved to another group and shot them the same way and so on…. While this was going on, two of my brothers exchanged the hug of death before their turn came. Suddenly a Jew on a motorcycle arrived carrying an order from his command to stop the massacre… and this is how the rest of villagers escaped death.
It appeared to me that the Jewish military command feared retaliation against Jewish prisoners captured by the Jordanian army. The death toll was believed to be about 78.
Laughing while murdering
Another witness is 75-year-old Abdulrahman Danash who recalls when I was digging a hole, which was to be my grave, I saw wandering soldiers giggling and whispering.
Each time the killing took place, the soldiers were heard giggling and talking, a friend of mine who happened to know Hebrew told me that they said: Look at these idiots who are digging their own graves. When I understood it, I started to work very slowly. After a short while I saw a soldier whom I recognized, I appealed to him to save my life. The soldier talked with the officer in charge who responded and sent the soldiers to get me and my friend out of the ditch. We escaped certain death.
A Pile of Corpses
On the wall of the home of the Sera family in the village of Friddis, a large portrait of perhaps hundreds of women and children from Tantora village is hung. The photograph shows them standing surrounded by Jewish military police waiting to be escorted out of their village Tantora. Under the photograph, the owner of the house wrote: In memory of the Tantora catastrophe, August 22, 1948. The owner of the house Ahmed Sera who died eight months prior to revealing the massacre and his wife “Imyasser” kept their memories of Tantora before they were moved to their current village of Friddis.
Katz met Sera few months before he died, and quoted Sera as saying: the village was more beautiful than Haifa in many respects. Until the war broke out, they lived side by side with Jews, they coexisted together. When the war brokthe inhabitants of Zichron Ya’acov settlement tried to convince the residents of Tantora to surrender and lay down their arms.
Though the village was unable to resist the onslaught on them any longer, the young men of the village refused to surrender. In the middle of the night of May 23, Jewish soldiers stormed the village and started shooting at random at each moving object, the scene resembled the picture of Hitler’s wars… Piles of corpses all over the place, it was a horrifying scene. Wherever we moved dead people were all around.
After conquering the village, they gathered survivors near the beach … the men in one group and the children and women in a second. They started to transfer the men’s group to the cemetery to be killed. I still recall what happened to a 16 or 17 year old handsome girl. Four soldiers dragged her from among the crowd and her uncle came to rescue her from the soldiers, they pushed him aside, when he refused to obey the orders they shot him in the head, he died instantly. The girl whose name was Rasmeyya left for the West Bank, all we have learned about her is that she never married.
The couple Sera and Imyasser said: Zakhron Ya’acov inhabitants came in the last moment to help and rescue the remaining people. Arguments flared up between them and the soldiers. The soldiers insisted to go on killing .. but the people of Zakhron Ya’cov stood firmly to prevent more killings. They used to know all the people of the village and had they came 15 minutes later, no one in Tantora would have survived the massacre.
The wife Imyasser added, when we left home we walked near many corpses and could not stop crying and weeping. The soldiers lined men like cows waiting for slaughter. While in the village they assembled the corpses in one high pile and ordered a tractor driver to dig a big hole and throw the corpses inside. I am sure they were intending to annihilate the entire local population had not the nearby Jews of Zichron Ya’acov rushed to our help.
Three brothers die by perfidious bullets
75-year old Raslan Omar now living in Tulkarm refugee camp and a former resident of Tantora told Katz: “A state that is established on crime and injustice will inevitably vanish and disappear, and a state based on justice will remain. Omar continues,
After the occupation of Tantora, they assembled people on the beach and selected seven from among the villagers to collect the bodies of the dead. While carrying out this job we found two corpses lying inside thorny cactus trees. I was unable to pick them up as the trees were full of thorns. A soldier complained to his officer about my refusal to enter and remove the corpses. At this moment the officer put his finger on the trigger of his pistol and pointed it at my head. I had no other choice except to risk and jump inside the thorny trees to drag the two corpses. Then I started with others to amass the corpses in piles each consisting of seven to ten people. We collected 60 to 70 corpses, perhaps more because I don’t remember the figure exactly. During this process many things have occurred. I saw a soldier bleeding from his hand who told the guards that he was going to kill two from my group to avenge his wound. He pointed to me and to the person standing by my side and wanted to take us with him. The other person stood careless and indifferent because he was carrying at that time the bodies of his two murdered brothers. He walked 100 meters forward before the soldier shot him.
For myself I did not follow him and was lucky to escape. Then another soldier came and ordered me to stand up and started to beat me with the butt of his rifle. As a result I fell down and stayed down. The injuries I received then are still with me, the pain - physical and mental never stopped.
Omar told Katz: All women and old people and children were transferred to Friddis village after being stripped of all their belongings including jewelry. All survivors between 10 to 100 years old were put in jail. First, they were taken to Zakhron Yaa’cov, then to Um Khalid village. Others were taken to other areas remote from Tantorra. As for myself , they kept me in jail for 11 months.
87 corpses in two mass graves
Mohsen Merei, born in Friddis, was seventeen years old at the time of the Tantora massacre. Merei was among other volunteers who left his village for Tantora to bury the corpses. They arrived two days after the massacre. In his testimony Merei said he put 40 to 45 bodies in one mass grave.
Affidavits of the killers: A Mass Grave
Shlomo Amper was 25 years old at the time of the massacre and was occupying the position of officer in charge of regiment 33. In his testimony to Katz, he told the following story: I was charged in the battle of Tantora with the task of blowing up a steel bridge in a nearby valley. Despite this definite job, I spent most of the day in the village and saw many things I prefer not to talk about….
After a moment of silence he continued: I was enlisted in the British army, and believed that the most important thing every Jew had to do was to fight the Nazis. But we fought in Tantora according to the laws of war acceptable to and decided by the international community. It is my duty to concede that even the German Nazis did not kill unarmed prisoners, some times releasing them safe to their homes. In Tantora it was different … they killed them. Despite this I do not believe that the number of victims here in Tantora was so high to justify such a wave of protest. In brief, we moved armored convoys to occupy a remote village lying far away from a main transportation road. When we reached the village we entered into face-to face fierce battles and did not kill people at random. The picture still living in my memory was the pile of corpses at the cemetery. There, I saw many people killed. I left the place when I saw soldiers killing, killing and killing … , I can’t figure out how many.
Mordechai Sokler: 230 causalities and a mountain of corpses
One of the army commanders who witnessed the massacre of Tantora was Mordachai Sokler, now 80 years, who gave the following affidavit:
“I was among the force of the Alexandroni brigade, which was ordered to march toward Tantora village. When the force reached the site of the battle I suddenly heard the buzzing of bullets and responded by firing in all directions since we did not know the exact source of fire.
On the next morning, I saw scores of bodies scattered all over the village. We dug a big hole opposite the railway in Khabeyat Al-Zojaj (an old building still standing today) and put the bodies in with the help of seven local inhabitants of Friddis village. The victims were blindfolded with Kuffias ( a traditional Palestinian head cover). We put them in a big mass grave. There was no record of the number of bodies, but I remember counting them - the number reached 230.
I still remember how a “mountain of death” was created after two days of burial, due to the swelling up of corpses in this mass grave. This “mountain” began to flatten two weeks later.
I am not sorry for what happened in Tantora because I am a fighter and this occurred in the battlefield. They fired against us and we didn’t know the source of fire … therefore we fired in all directions. “I am not a murderer.”
Feelings of revenge
El-Hanan Annani fled with other members of his family from the Nazi atrocities and came to Palestine 15 years before the Tantora massacre, he was a soldier in brigade (A) and 20 years old at that time.
In his affidavit to Katz, he conceded: Believe me, I have been thinking during all these long years of what occurred in Tantora … perhaps this massacre was perpetrated to avenge losing many of our comrades in arms by Arab fighters in Kofer Saba battle one week before. This drove many soldiers mad with stirred feelings of revenge and hatred. He added; in many regiments including mine, soldiers were thirsty for blood, in many cases it was very hard to control them. Besides, there was no specific policy on shooting civilians after surrendering.
Killing of civilians
A characteristic of streets war
Maj. Gen.- reserve Bents Fredan, the commander of Tantora massacre and then commander in chief of Alexandaroni brigade, confirmed the killing of many Palestinians in the battle for Tantora .
He said, this was a war … and in any war, particularly this one, taking place in residential areas, many civilians would be killed. When you see your enemy in front of you, you will not see a paper hanging on his body saying that he is not intending to kill you. You have no choice but to shoot him. We moved from one street to another to comb the village and this is why many people were massacred.
Killing in cold blood
74-year old Shalom Natanly says that he was the first soldier to enter the village. He told Katz: We assembled the prisoners near the mosque and ordered them to go to Tulkarm. We told them: This is the road to Tulkarm … go directly and any one who returns and goes out of the road will be killed. He argued, no soldier has shot any local Palestinian, but many people were killed during the battle. We moved from house to house and hurled hand grenades inside the houses. If there were women and children inside they would certainly die . We had no other choice. At that time, it was war and in the war people are killed. Today there are different ways … there are missiles and more sophisticated weapons.
Killing is a profession
On May 27, 1948, few days after the breakout of the Tantora battle, Naftali Macobesky, a soldier in brigade 33, wrote in his daily memoirs: What I have learned here is that the soldiers are perfectly exercising the profession of killing. The soldiers vented their anger and bitterness accumulated as a result of losing their comrades in arms in other battles with the Arabs. I felt that they were relieved after killing the Palestinians.
Tantora: Facts and History
This Arab village was located on the Mediterranean coastline 30 kms south of Haifa, and was built on the ruins of the old Can’anite city Dora whose hamlets are situated four hundred yards north of the village.
Dora City was a trade center during the Greek period, serving as a commercial link between Egypt and Palestine. The city was famous as were other Palestinian cities in silk manufacturing. The Crusaders built a strategic castle known as “Mirl” north of the village. Tantora is an archaeological site with a fortress, a harbor, and remains of buildings, cemeteries, columns and other architectural sites. The British Archaeological School carried out excavation work at the site between 1923 to 1925 and discovered a set of pottery products dating back to various historic epochs starting with the Bronze age and until the Arab times.
Tantora Harbor lies north of the village. It is a semi-square bay 100m * 100m in size. Tiny islands are scattered opposite Tantora stretching from north to south.
AL-Mazera valley lies 3 km to the south while Al-Zarka stream extends 6 km in the same direction.
In the village, according to statistics carried out in 1931, there were over 300 houses, two built with stone. The village was built on 119 dunums of land. The total area of the village in 1945 was 14,520 dunums out of which Jews owned about 14.2 percent.
The village population was 750 by the year 1922 , and by 1931, the population was 953 inhabitant including one Jew. In 1945, the number of people in the village was 1490.
The village had two elementary schools (one for boys and the other for girls).
The population were totally dependent for their livelihood on agriculture- particularly fruit trees- and on fishing. In 1943 there were about 260 dunums planted with oranges southeast of the village and 20 dunums planted with olive trees. The annual production of fishing increased from six tons in1928 to 1622 tons in 1944.
In 1948, the Zionist troops wreaked havoc in the village, made its inhabitants destitute, and destroyed the village. In the following year, Jews emigrating from Greece established Moshav “Dor” on its land, there were 170 of them by 1970. In addition to Moshav Dor, Jewish immigrants from the US and Poland established Kibbutz “Nahshuleem” one kilometer north of the village, by 1970 they numbered 253 persons.
Palestine Ministry of Information
February 15, 2000