Beirut had stayed out of fighting but Jewish state's troops carried atrocities across border nonetheless
The massacre of nearly 70 residents from the border village of Houla 55 years ago Friday was one of a series of atrocities carried out by the fledgling Israeli Army during the course of Operation Hiram to rid Galilee of the last remnants of Arab resistance during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
Yet while the war crimes against the Palestinian population of Galilee have been well-documented notably by Israeli historians such as Benny Morris the still unexplained slaughter in Houla remains confined to local folklore and half-remembered memories.
The massacre came at the end of the 60-hour Operation Hiram when the Israeli Army invaded South Lebanon and captured around 14 villages between Blida and Kfar Kila.
The Arab Liberation Army (ALA), led by Fawzi Qaouqji, a Syrian, was driven out of Galilee by the advancing Israeli forces and had abandoned its border position on Sheikh Abbad Hill, 1 kilometer east of Houla and today the site of a massive Israeli military compound.
On the morning of Oct. 31, 1948, Ahmad Hassan Abdullah walked toward a column of soldiers marching south along the border road toward Houla.
Abdullah, who had served with the British Army in World War II, says he believed the arriving troops were rumored reinforcements.
“When the first soldiers entered the outskirts of the village, they began shooting in the air. I knew then that these were no replacement troops but Israelis,” Abdullah recalled. “I yelled at everyone to get off the street.”
Dozens of panicked residents fled the village, heading west toward Shaqra and Majdal Silm, as other Israeli columns marched up from the south.
Not everyone in Houla was able to escape in time. Some 70 villagers were rounded up by the Israeli soldiers and segregated into three groups according to age. The women were released and instructed to leave the village. Among one group of young men was a 24-year-old farmer called Hussein Mohammed Rizk.
“The Jews separated the men into groups of between 10 and 15 people,” he recalled. “I was in a group of people about my age. The Israelis then forced us into three houses on the western edge of the village. My group was put in a house next to the pond. A Jew came in and told us to stand and face the wall. When we did, he shot us with his machine gun. He swung the gun back and forth and kept firing.
The first bullet hit me in the thigh. As I fell to the ground, another bullet struck me in the arm. The shooting stopped and the Jew left the room. Everyone around me looked dead.” As the less fortunate residents were rounded up and split into groups by the soldiers, Abdullah fled westward with several other people who had escaped before the village was surrounded.
“The Israelis climbed onto the roofs of houses and began shooting at us. Four people in front of me were killed. I was running just behind them with my brother and two other people. The Israelis put a Bren gun (a British machine gun) on the roof. I knew about Brens from my time in the British Army. I told everyone to lie flat. Then the Israeli began shooting at us. I told the others to stay on the ground until his magazine had run out. When the Israeli stopped shooting, we jumped up and continued running while he changed the magazine on the Bren. Then I saw some soldiers were chasing us and yelling at us to stop. One of them had a Sten gun (a 9mm sub-machine gun) on his shoulder. The soldier was about 100 meters behind us and I knew we were out of range of the Sten so we kept running. Then we heard explosions behind us in the village.”
Rizk initially believed he was the only survivor of the shooting in the house. He stood up to leave when he noticed smoke rising from an explosive charge that had been placed in the center of the room.
“All I knew was that I didn’t want to die. There was a big explosion and the walls and roof collapsed on me. A large wooden beam fell across my waist and I was trapped. I stayed in the room until early evening.”
Yehia Mohammed Jawad, 17, also survived the shooting and explosion. He had been shot in the waist and the same beam that pinned Rizk down had smashed his knees. The two men extricated themselves from beneath the beam and crawled out of the house, where they were spotted by an Israeli soldier. “I ran away but Jawad couldn’t run and the Jew caught him. Jawad said to him: ‘Please give me some water before you kill me.’ But the Jew said ‘I’m not going to kill you, just get out of here.’”
Rizk was found by his father that evening and taken to hospital in Tyre. He woke the following morning to see Jawad lying in the next bed. Jawad, who was seriously injured, told Rizk he had been found by a returning villager and taken to Majdal Silm. But the teenager failed to
recover from his injuries and died a week later.
Rizk spent 22 days in hospital before being released. He and the other villagers were taken to Dbayyeh, on the coast north of Beirut, where the government was in the process of establishing a refugee camp for the Palestinians.
They only returned to Houla six months later, after the Israelis withdrew from Lebanon on the signing of the Armistice Agreements. The residents found the village in ruins, the buildings blown up and destroyed by fire.
No satisfactory explanation has emerged for the massacre in Houla, nor indeed for the invasion of Lebanon. At least 67 villagers were known to have been killed, ranging in age from an 80-year-old woman to three 15-year-old boys. At least six of the victims were women.
The invading Israeli troops met with no resistance Israel had assured Beirut earlier in the war that it would not attack if Lebanon stayed out of the fighting, which it did.
Indeed, a contemporary Israeli account of the invasion noted that the greatest dangers faced by the invading troops were from “aggressive Levantine salesmen armed with fountain pens, nylons, and souvenir trinkets from the markets of Beirut and Tyre.” Yet the massacre fitted into a pattern of atrocities committed by the Israeli Army against Palestinian villagers in Galilee during the Hiram operation.
General Moshe Carmel, the commander of Israeli forces during the operation, ordered a 5 kilometer strip south of the Lebanese border cleared of all Arabs. His soldiers appear to have carried out the order with brutal zeal.
One of the few official Israeli records acknowledging and detailing the atrocities that occurred in central Galilee noted “52 men (in Safsaf) tied with a rope and dropped into a well and shot. Ten were killed. Women pleaded for mercy. three cases of rape. A girl of 14 was raped. Another four were killed.” Other massacres occurred in Saliha, Jish, Sasa, Bina, Deir Assad and Nahf.
Bearing in mind that Operation Hiram occurred just three years after the end of the Nazi Holocaust, a respected Zionist official, Yosef Nahmani, used a chilling comparison in condemning the atrocities.
“Where did they come by such a measure of cruelty, like Nazis?” he wrote in his diary. “They (the Israeli Army) had learnt from them (the Nazis). One officer told me that those who had ‘excelled’ had come from (concentration) camps.”
Israel conducted at least two investigations into atrocities during Operation Hiram. But the military documents, including reports from officers in the field, testimonies to the inquiry commissions and their final reports, like almost all other documents related to Israeli Army expulsions or massacres of Arabs or prisoners of war since 1948, remain classified.
Nicholas Blanford Special to The Daily Star
© The Daily Star 2003
