Of the 127 Haganah fighters and Jewish kibbutzniks who died during the defence of the settlement, Martin Gilbert states that fifteen were killed on surrendering.

[3] The surrendering Jewish residents and fighters are said to have been assembled in a courtyard, only to be suddenly fired upon; it is said that many died on the spot, while most of those who managed to flee were hunted down and killed.

The bodies of the victims were left unburied until, one and a half years later, the Jordanian government allowed Shlomo Goren to collect the remains, which were then interred at Mount Herzl.

[5] Kfar Etzion was a kibbutz founded in 1943, for military and agricultural ends,[6] about 2 km west of the road between Jerusalem and Hebron.

[11] According to Henry Laurens, Kfar Etzion had started hostilities in the area in December by destroying a local Arab village.

[12] On 10 December, a convoy from Bethlehem en route to the Gush Etzion bloc was ambushed and 10 of its 26 passengers and escorts were killed.

[6][13] Though on January 5, the children and some women had been evacuated with British assistance, and though David Shaltiel recommended its evacuation,[6] the Haganah, on Yigal Yadin's counsel, decided against withdrawing from the settlements for several reasons: they commanded a strategic position on Jerusalem's southern approach from Hebron,[14] and were considered, in the words of Abdullah Tall, a 'sharp thorn stuck in the heart of a purely Arab area'.

An emergency reinforcement convoy attempting to march to Gush Etzion under cover of darkness was discovered and its members killed by Palestinian Arab forces.

[citation needed] Despite some emergency flights by an Auster from Jerusalem[6] and Piper Cubs out of Tel Aviv onto an improvised airfield,[5] adequate supplies were not getting in.

On March 27, land communication with the rest of the Yishuv was severed completely when the Nebi Daniel Convoy was ambushed on its return to Jerusalem, and 15 Haganah soldiers died before the remainder were extricated by the British.

Parts of two Arab Legion companies, assisted by hundreds of local irregulars, had a dozen armored cars and artillery, to which the Jewish defenders had no effective answer.

Later in the day, the Arabs captured the Russian Orthodox monastery, which the Haganah used as a perimeter fortress for the Kfar Etzion area, killing twenty-four of its thirty-two defenders.

[20] In the Israeli mainstream version, when the hopelessness of their position became undeniable on May 13, dozens of defenders, the haverim, of Kfar Etzion laid down their arms and assembled in the courtyard, where they suddenly began to be shot at.

[25] A number of Israeli histories of the Kfar Etzion massacre (such as Levi, 1986, Isseroff, 2005) state that the defenders had put out the white flag and lined up to surrender in front of the school building of the German monastery.

Fearing that the defenders might suffer the same fate as those of Kfar Etzion, Zionist leaders in Jerusalem negotiated a deal for the surrender of the settlements on condition that the Arab Legion protected the residents.

[30][31] The bodies of the killed of Kfar Etzion were left at the site for a year and a half, until in November 1949, the Chief Military Rabbi, Shlomo Goren was allowed to collect their bones.