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[1][2][3][4][5] The massacre was a response to an Irgun terrorist attack, where grenades were thrown into a crowd of about 100 day-labourers waiting at a bus stop outside the main gate of the then British-owned Haifa Oil Refinery.

[6] Minutes after the Irgun attack, Arab refinery workers and others began attacking the Jewish refinery workers, resulting in 39–41 deaths and 49 injuries, before the British Army and Palestine Police units arrived to put an end to the violence.

The Haganah mounted a retaliatory raid which became known as the Balad al-Shaykh massacre on the villages of Balad al-Shaykh and nearby Hawassa, where some of the Arab refinery workers lived.

Zachary Lockman wrote that "the Jewish attackers killed some sixty men, women, and children and destroyed several dozen houses.