On 9 April 72 years ago Zionist gangs Irgun and Stern committed an appalling massacre in the Jerusalemite village of Deir Yassin killing between 250 and 360 Palestinians including children and women.
According to survivors’ testimonies the terrorist attack on Deir Yassin a village located to the west of Jerusalem City started at 3:00 am. However Irgun and Stern gangs were surprised by the villagers’ fierce resistance.
Four members of the gangs died and 32 others suffered injuries in the confrontations prompting them to seek help from Haganah another Zionist gang which sent reinforcements to the village.
The Zionist gangs opened fire indiscriminately at the villagers. By noon at least 107 people half of whom women children and elders had been murdered. Some were shot while others died when hand grenades were thrown into their homes.
Before the Israeli gangs withdrew from the village several Palestinian villagers who were still alive were taken prisoners loaded into trucks paraded through the streets of the western area of Jerusalem and then taken to a stone quarry near Deir Yassin and shot to death.
International organizations including the Red Cross were denied access to the crime scene to investigate the massacre and find out what happened on the ground.
Menachem Begin one of Israel’s prime ministers who was the leader of the Irgun gang that participated in the attack on Deir Yassin was quoted admitting “Without what was done at Deir Yassin there would not have been a state of Israel… The Arabs began fleeing in panic shouting ‘Deir Yassin.'”
In a book he wrote Begin bragged about this vicious massacre saying that after killing and displacing hundreds of Palestinians only 165000 remained of the nearly 800000 Arabs who lived in the Palestinian territories occupied in 1948.
“We created terror among the Arabs” Begin triumphantly boasted after Deir Yassin. “In one blow we changed the strategic situation.”
The Deir Yassin massacre was the straw that broke the camel’s back during the 1948 war and forced hundreds of Palestinians to flee their homes and villages to other areas in Palestine and neighboring Arab countries.
In the summer of 1949 hundreds of Jewish immigrants settled near Deir Yassin village in a new colony named Givat Shaul Bet.
Some of the village’s buildings are still standing. A psychiatric hospital was built there and some old homes which are located outside the hospital’s site are being used for residential and commercial purposes.
