[3] On 29 October 1956, the Israeli army ordered that all Arab villages near the Green Line, at that time, the de facto border between Israel and the Jordanian West Bank, to be placed under a wartime curfew.

[4] The border policemen who were involved in the shooting were brought to trial and found guilty and sentenced to prison terms ranging from 7 to 17 years.

[8] Issachar (Yissachar) "Yiska" Shadmi—the highest-ranking official prosecuted for the massacre—stated, shortly before his death, that he believed that his trial was staged to protect members of the Israeli political and military elite, including Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, from taking responsibility for the massacre.

[4][14] On October 29, 1956, the Israeli army ordered that all Arab villages near the Jordanian border be placed under a wartime curfew[4] from 5 p.m. to 6 a.m. on the following day.

That morning, Shadmi, who was in charge of the Triangle, received orders to take all precautionary measures to ensure quiet on the Jordanian border.

To that he answered me in Arabic, Allah Yarhamu, which I understood as equivalent to the Hebrew phrase, 'Blessed be the true judge' [said on receiving news of a person's death]'.Shadmi, however, denied that the matter of the returnees ever came up in his conversation with Malinki.

'[20] One Israeli soldier, Shalom Ofer, later admitted: 'We acted like Germans, automatically, we didn't think', but never expressed remorse or regret for his actions.

Nonetheless, news of the incident leaked out after communist Knesset Members Tawfik Toubi and Meir Vilner managed to enter the village two weeks later and investigate the rumours.

Shadmi was subsequently charged as well, but his separate court hearing (February 29, 1959) found him innocent of murder and only guilty of extending the curfew without authority.

[27] The fact that other local commanders realised they had to disobey Shadmi's order was cited by the court as one of the reasons for denying Dahan's claim that he had no choice.

[8] In 2017, historian Adam Raz appealed to the military appellate tribunal for release of documents relating to the massacre, including the trial minutes.

[30] In 2021, the tribunal refused the request and imposed a gag order on the entire case, even including the fact that a ruling had been made.

[30] Former state archivist Yaacov Lozowick, who is familiar with the material sought by Raz, told Haaretz that "the degree of imbecility of this decision is so great, that no further comment is needed.

[9] A similar opinion is held by historian Adam Raz, who described the massacre as pre-planned and part of an Operation which would result in the expulsion of the Arab Israelis from the region.

"[9] The trial transcript, released for publication in 2022, reveals that company commanders were briefed before the start of hostilities that there was an official plan to push the inhabitants of Kafr Qasim across the Green Line to the Jordanian-occupied village of Tira.

[32] The Kafr Qasim trial considered for the first time the issue of when Israeli security personnel are required to disobey illegal orders.

Judge Benjamin Halevy's words, still much-quoted today, were that The hallmark of manifest illegality is that it must wave like a black flag over the given order, a warning that says: "forbidden!"

The proposed bill, which was opposed by Kfar Qasim resident and Regional Cooperation Minister Esawi Freije, also included provisions to incorporate information on the incident in school syllabuses and for the declassification of all archival documents related to it.

[37] In a 2006 academic article focusing on the massacre's commemoration, Shira Robinson[38] considers the sulha as a "charade" which villagers were highly pressurized to participate in, designed to position the conflict "within a contrived history of symmetrical violence between Arabs and Jews," staged by the government for the purpose of escaping its responsibilities and lightening the weight of the court's verdict, making the ceremony itself "part of the crime that Palestinians commemorate today.

In this paper, Slyomovics notably relies upon Ibrahim Sarsur's testimony, which concluded: "Until today in Kafr Qasim, there is no one who agrees with the manner of treatment of the government of Israel concerning the massacre and its consequences.

The founder of the Islamic Movement in Israel, Sheikh Abdullah Nimr Darwish, also spoke at the ceremony and called on religious leaders on both sides to build bridges between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

[22][43] On 26 October 2014 Reuven Rivlin, keeping an electoral promise, became the first sitting President of Israel to attend the annual commemorations for the fallen at Kfar Qasim.