A
History of A Forgotten Humanity
|
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.
Top of the Page
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.
Top of the Page
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."
Top of the Page
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."
Top of the Page
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.
Top of the Page
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,
Top of the Page
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.
Top of the Page
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."
Top of the Page
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.
Top of the Page
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.
Bulldozers set about digging mass graves in broad daylight in south
Shatila with the help of the Israelis . . .
Top
of the Page
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."
Husayn Ra'd, 46, states, "the terrorists
beheaded people with cleavers, and while they were at it they hurled curses and
insults at their victims. They were slaughtering women and children right and
left." And he adds, "The residents started running away in the direction of the
multinational forces. But they didn't protect them, especially in the Hamra
area."
Top of the Page
As for Mahmoud Hashim, 28, a witness of the massacre who at the time
was about 15 years old, he relates, "It was a Friday night and I was sleeping
with some friends of mine in the camp. At about 11:00 we heard gun fire, but we
didn't think anything of it. So we slept through till the next morning, but we
woke up to find nothing in the camp but dogs and cats. We went out to see what
was going on, and when we came near the Galilee School, we found a pile of
corpses . .
. . . 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."
Top
of the Page
After the terrorists had withdrawn, survivors
wandered frantically about in search of relatives whose bodies were now
somewhere among the piles of cadavers or buried beneath the rubble. Of course,
they were still living the nightmare of the massacre they had just been
through.
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."
Radio London reported via one of its correspondents
that while the killings were going on, Israeli soldiers surrounded the camps
with tanks, shooting anything that moved.
Top of the Page
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.
Top of the Page
The Massacre at the "Tunnel"
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.