http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000119/wl/mideast_massacre_2.html
Israeli Researcher Uncovers 1948 Bloodbath
By Wafa Amr,
Wednesday January 19 11:51 AM ET
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - An Israeli historian said
Wednesday that he had uncovered credible evidence
that troops massacred 200 Palestinians in a
single village on the day Israel came into being
in 1948.
Teddy Katz, who researched events in the village
of Tantura for a masters degree, said he had
spoken to witnesses including soldiers who were
present to support his findings.
``It started at night and was over in a few
hours,'' Katz said of the attack on May 15, 1948.
``From testimonies and information I got from
Jewish and Arab witnesses and from soldiers who
were there, at least 200 people from the village
of Tantura were killed by Israeli troops
``From the numbers, this is definitely one of the
biggest massacres,'' he told Reuters.
When the British high commissioner for Palestine
departed in mid-May under a U.N. partition plan
envisaging Jewish and Arab states, the Jews
proclaimed the state of Israel. This prompted
Arab armies to invade Israeli territory, and
long-running skirmishes became open warfare.
Katz said 14 Israeli soldiers were killed when
they ambushed the village. The Israeli army
commander who led the assault was quoted as
saying the villagers' deaths were a consequence
of war and that reports of a massacre were ``just
stories.''
Katz said the attack was mentioned in only a
handful of Palestinian history books and in the
Israeli army archives.
Tantura, near Haifa in northern Israel, had 1,500
residents at the time. It was later demolished to
make way for a parking lot for a nearby beach and
the Nahsholim kibbutz, or cooperative farm.
Worse Than Deir Yassin
Katz said the killing spree in Tantura was more
tragic and bigger than in the village of Deir
Yassin just west of Jerusalem, where scores of
Palestinians were killed on April 9, 1948, in an
assault by Jewish armed groups.
Reports just after the Deir Yassin killings spoke
of some 240 deaths though Israeli and Palestinian
historians now accept that the number of
fatalities was probably no more than 120.
Deir Yassin has long stood as the defining symbol
of what Palestinians call al-Nakba (The Great
Catastrophe).
They use the term to refer to their dispossession
and exile when up to 700,000 Palestinians fled
from their towns and villages or were driven out
by Jewish troops in the conflict between Arab and
Jew that surrounded Israel's creation.
Fawzi Tanji, now 73 and a refugee at a camp in
the West Bank, is from Tantura and worked until
May 1948 as a guard for the army in British
Mandate Palestine.
Lined Up And Shot
He told Reuters he had watched as Israeli troops
took over the village, lined men up against a
cemetery wall and shot them. Katz said 95 men
were killed at the cemetery.
``I was 21 years old then. They took a group of
10 men, lined them up against the cemetery wall
and killed them. Then they brought another group,
killed them, threw away the bodies and so on,''
Tanji said. ``I was waiting for my turn to die in
cold blood as I saw the men drop in front of
me.''
Tanji said the killing stopped when a Jew from
the nearby settlement of Zichron Yaacov arrived
at the scene, took out a pistol and threatened to
shoot himself unless the soldiers stopped the
executions.
Katz said other Palestinians were killed inside
their homes and in other parts of the village. At
one point, he said, soldiers shot at anything
that moved. Villagers resisted with the few guns
they had, but they were soon taken over.
The Israeli newspaper Maariv, which reported
Katz's findings Wednesday, quoted the commander
of the Tantura attack as saying his troops had no
grounds to ask questions or spare lives.
``It was war ... When you see the enemy opposite
you, he doesn't have a note saying he doesn't
mean to shoot you. When you see him, you shoot
him,'' retired colonel Bentz Pridan said.
``That's how we went, from street to street, and
that explains why a lot of people were killed,''
he told Maariv.
