Sixty-six years ago about 50 Palestinians including 23 children and several women were massacred in the village of Kafr Qassem in 1948 Occupied Palestine.
On the 29th of October 1956 Israeli border guards shot dead Palestinian citizens of Kafr Qassem after a curfew had been imposed on the village. Orders to kill any person seen outside their home after 17:00 were obeyed.
When villagers who left home in the early morning unaware that a curfew had been imposed later on returned from their work to Kafr Qassem they were gunned down.
As part of the Israeli ethnic cleansing policy it was planned that Palestinians in Kafr Qassem end up killed or frightened and expelled.
However survivors along with other Palestinians each year gather at the Martyrs’ Memorial in the center of Kafr Qassem affirming that the Palestinian martyrs will not be forgotten and the Israeli heinous massacre will never be forgiven.
Several Palestinian schools dedicate a week before the anniversary of the bloodbath to educating the students about it displaying photographs of the victims in addition to a handful of blank picture frames for the bodies that were too badly disfigured to be identified according to the Electronic Intifada.
Premeditated Massacre
The goal of expelling Palestinians has been an inseparable part of the Israeli plots. The massacre came only eight years after the 1948 Nakbah when more than half the Palestinian population were ethnically cleansed and over 600 villages razed to the ground.
As the massacre was widely condemned its perpetrators were brought to trial. Although the officers involved in the massacre were sentenced to lengthy prison terms they spent a very short time in prison and were released within a year following a presidential pardon.
On the 29th of July 2022 Israel disclosed some of the details surrounding the 1956 Kafr Qassem massacre by releasing court documents related to the trial of Israeli soldiers.
According to the testimony of the Israeli commander Chaim Levy he had been told by the battalion commander Shmuel Malinki that “It’s desirable that there be some fatalities.”
It seems that there was ambiguity in the plan behind the massacre yet soldiers interpreted it as “orders to clear out the Palestinian town” just as they have done on many occasions previously.
The Israelis have argued that although the plan to kill and expel Palestinians existed it was shelved. Nonetheless the newly declassified transcripts of the trial that followed the massacre disprove such a claim.
Ongoing plots against Kafr Qassem
On the 27th of July 2022 it was announced that a new football stadium would be built in the town of Kafr Qassem.
“UAE is funding the construction of an Israeli stadium on the ruins of the Palestinian village of Kafr Qassem which witnessed the massacre committed by Israel against about 50 Palestinians” according to Al-Jazeera journalist Tamer Almisshal from Gaza.
Israeli news website Ynet News reported that the plan to build the stadium that will have a capacity for 8000 people will be implemented in the coming months.
