Mass Grave Reveals Hundreds of 1948 Palestinians Killed by ’Israelis’

Local Editor

The remains of hundreds of Palestinians killed by "Israelis" in fighting following the 1948 Nakba (Arab-"Israeli" war, Catastrophe) have been found in a mass grave in Tel Aviv's Jaffa district.

An official at the Muslim Kazkhana cemetery told AFP on Friday that the horrible finding occurred on Wednesday May 29, when ground caved in as workers carried out renovations. Six chambers full of skeletons were revealed.

Eighty year-old Atar Zeinab, a Jaffa fisherman, said that during the final months of fighting in 1948, as a teenager, he helped collect the bodies of the killed Palestinians in the area south of Jaffa and bring them for quick burial in the cemetery.

"I carried to the cemetery 60 bodies during a period of three or four months," he told AFP. "We used to find the people in the street and most of the time we didn't know who they were."

Bodies were dumped one on top of the other in family crypts in the cemetery, contrary to Muslim custom. That was due to the danger of being hit by flying bullets or grenade fragments, he explained.

"We carried them early in the morning or in the night," he recalled. "We put women, children and men in the same place... nobody prayed for these people."

The al-Aqsa Foundation for Endowment and Heritage stated that the new discoveries are the remains of people killed during the expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland and the establishment of "Israel" 65 years ago.

They were killed in the shelling of residential neighborhoods or by snipers located around Jaffa.

Jaffa used to be a Palestinian town. However, it was expropriate, and its Arab population was expelled en masse when the town fell to the fledgling "Israeli" army and rightwing Jewish militias. In 1948. It was incorporated into the city of Tel Aviv in 1950.

Palestinians refer to the May 15, 1948 occupation of Palestine as the Nakba Day, which means the Day of the Catastrophe in Arabic.

Around 760,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes. "Israeli" forces have wiped nearly 500 Palestinian villages and towns off the map. An estimated total of 4.7 million Palestinians became refugees, hoping for a final return to their homeland more than six decades later.

Since 1948, the "Israeli" regime has denied Palestinian refugees the right of return, despite United Nations resolutions and international laws that uphold the people's right to return to their homeland, and declared the Nakba as their "war of independence".

Source: News Agencies, edited by website team