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Politics : Israel to U.S. : Now Deal with Syria and Iran -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GUSTAVE JAEGER who wrote (2704)	10/24/2003 12:46:19 PM
From: Emile Vidrine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 22250

Israeli Atrocities ariga.com Meir Pail's Eyewitness Account Deir Yassin was a quiet village, that had a pact with us that had been approved by Yitzhak Navon, then Head of the Arab section of the Haganah Jerusalem Intelligence Service and later President of Israel. The people of Deir Yassin had kept to the pact. The Mukhtar's son had even been killed fighting off an attempt to bring in foreign Arab troops.I never heard about any shooting at our side coming from Deir Yassin or from foreign Arab soldiers in Deir Yassin in 1948, and there was none that I know of on the night before the attack. Dawn was breaking as we got to the village. I didn't hear or see any signal given, and I didn't know the password. It seemed to me that they just ran in and attacked. We hid in some houses. The Irgun and Lehi had some Lee Enfield British rifles, Bren guns, Tommy guns and Sten guns, though some of the Stens didn't work. They may have had knives too, but I didn't see any. The villagers had no automatic weapons. We found a hiding place in a small empty house. The Irgun and Lehi people fought in no sort of order. They didn't know how to cover each other and so on. The fighting went pretty well on the Lehi side, but the Irgun got stuck. I suppose it was around ten o'clock in the morning judging from the Sun, when I heard some light mortar shells fly across the village and hit the house of the Mukhtar in the western part of Deir Yassin. They seemed to be two inch mortar shells. I started hearing shooting in the village. The fighting was over, yet there was the sound of firing of all kinds from different houses. Sporadic firing, not like you would hear when they clear a house. I took my chap with me and went to see what was happening. We went into houses. They were typical Arab houses. Most of the houses there are one-story, though there are a few two story houses like the Mukhtar's house and a few others. In the corners we saw dead bodies. Almost all the dead were old people, children or women, with a few men here and there. They stood them up in the corners and shot them. In another corner there were some more bodies, in the next house more bodies and so on. They also shot people running from houses, and prisoners. Mostly women and children. I saw this horror, and I was shocked and angry, because I had never seen such a thing, murdering people after a place had been conquered. Afterwards in the War of Independence it happened in a few other places, but it was the first time in my life I had ever seen such a thing. Around noon, I saw that they had gotten together around twenty or twenty five males near the entrance to the village on the field track. A truck came in, and they put them on a truck, and drove off to the city. Meanwhile the massacre continued About three quarters of an hour or an hour later the truck came back. The prisoners were led to a place in the quarries between Deir Yassin and Givat Shaul. We could see this from the village, and I suppose some survivors might have seen it too. We saw them going to the quarry, so my companion and I perched on a vantage point above the quarry and took some pictures down into it. There was a natural wall there, formed by digging out the quarry, along one side. There were a group of dissidents there, Irgun or Lehi, and they stood the prisoners against that wall and shot the lot of them. I know that the next day, or the day after, on Sunday the Red Cross sent De Reynier and the Histadrut doctors came, but I never met those people and I wasn't there. De Reynier reported about 200 dead. I assume that the true count is in between 200 and 250. Most of the bodies were women and children. There were no Palestinian irregular 'gangs' there or people of the 'Tsva Hatzala' (Salvation Army of the Arab League). The inhabitants of Deir Yassin had kept their word up to the last minute."