Sunday, December 26, 2010

245 or 110?

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The Ministry of Information of the Palestinian Authority has a history lesson for you from 1948:-


April 9: Irgun and Stern Gangs led by Menahim Begin and Yitzhak Shamir massacre 245 Palestinians in the village of Deir Yassin, western suburb of Jerusalem.

April 11: Haganah destroy village of Kalonia near Qastel and occupy Deir Yassin.


However, Uri Milstein writes that according to Arab sources, the death toll was about 100, much lower than the 254 victims that was initially reported by the Jewish Agency and the international press

and
 

SHAI’s Yonah Feitelson, who toured Deir-Yassin early on April 10, told his superiors that he had seen 80 dead. When Ari’eli returned from Deir-Yassin on the 13th, he told his wife that his GADNA unit had buried 70 corpses and blown up another 40, a total of 110. In 1981, an ex-villager, Mohammed Aref Samir, told an interviewer that 94 bodies “were gathered that day.” (Kol Ha'Ir, May 1, 1981) Bir-Zeit University researchers arrived at a figure of 110 after interviewing survivors. (Sharif Kanaana and Nihad Zitawi, "Deir Yassin," Monograph No. 4, Destroyed Palestinian Villages Documentation Project (Bir Zeit: Documentation Center of Bir Zeit University, 1987, p. 55). The number of dead appears to have been 110.

and

"There was no Massacre there" by Yerach Tal, in Ha'Aretz 8.9.91, page B3

See also this.

Another article which views the Arab side "Massacre was done there" by Dani Rubinstein Ha'Aretz 11.9.91 Page B2 states that in a new Bir-Zeit research of the affair the number of killed was estimated at 107.

with this, too:

I asked Dr. Khalidi how we should cover the story. He said, "We must make the most of this". So we wrote a press release stating that at Deir Yassin children were murdered, pregnant women were raped. All sorts of atrocities.

- Hazen Nusseibeh, an editor of the Palestine Broadcasting Service's Arabic news in 1948, was interviewed for the BBC television series "Israel and the Arabs: the 50-year conflict." He describes an encounter with Deir Yassin survivors and Palestinian leaders, including Hussein Khalidi, the secretary of the Arab Higher Committee, at the Jaffa Gate of Jerusalem's Old City.


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