[1] After about 30 years of conflict in Mandatory Palestine between Palestinian Arabs, the British authorities and Palestinian Jews, the British decided in February 1947 to terminate the Mandate and, on 29 November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 181 (II) recommending the adoption and implementation of a plan of partition of Palestine.
The day after the vote, Arabs launched attacks against the Jews, killing 126 of them during the first two weeks and 75 were massacred in a refugee camp in Aden as a retaliation.
[3] Across the country, Jewish cars were the target of stone throwing, while the consulates of Poland and Sweden, which voted in favor of partition, were attacked.
[4] On 15 May 1948, following the Israeli Declaration of Independence the previous day, the armies of a number of Arab countries invaded what had just ceased to be Mandatory Palestine, turning the conflict into the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.
[6][7][8] According to Benny Morris the Yishuv (or later Israeli) soldiers killed roughly 800 Arab civilians and prisoners of war in 24 massacres.
[9] Saleh Abdel Jawad lists 68 villages where acts of indiscriminate killing of prisoners, and civilians took place, where no threat was posed to Yishuv or Israeli soldiers.
[6][11][12] According to Rosemarie Esber, both Israeli archives and Palestinian testimonies confirm killings occurred in numerous Arab villages.
[18] Saleh Abd al-Jawad reports on the village's mukhtar account[19] that 455 people were missing following the al-Dawayima massacre, including 170 women and children.
On 12 December 1947, the Irgun placed a car bomb opposite the Damascus Gate, the main entrance to the Old City of Jerusalem, killing 20 people.
[20] On 4 January 1948, the Lehi detonated a lorry bomb against the headquarters of the paramilitary al-Najjada located in Jaffa's Town Hall, killing 15 Arabs and injuring 80.
[20][21] During the night between 5 and 6 January, in Jerusalem, the Haganah bombed the Semiramis Hotel that had been reported to hide Arab militiamen, killing 24 people.
[22] The next day, Irgun members in a stolen police van rolled a barrel bomb[23] into a large group of civilians who were waiting for a bus by the Jaffa Gate, killing 20.
[91] Generally speaking, this precept requires that "weapons remain pure [and that] they are employed only in self-defence and [never] against innocent civilians and defenceless people".
"[94] According to Avi Shlaim, "purity of arms" is one of the key features of 'the conventional Zionist account or old history' whose 'popular-heroic-moralistic version of the 1948 war' is 'taught in Israeli schools and used extensively in the quest for legitimacy abroad'.
[92] Morris adds that '[t]he Israelis' collective memory of fighters characterized by "purity of arms" is also undermined by the evidence of [the dozen case] of rapes committed in conquered towns and villages.'
According to him, 'after the war, the Israelis tended to hail the "purity of arms" of its militiamen and soldiers to contrast this with Arab barbarism, which on occasion expressed itself in the mutilation of captured Jewish corpses.'
"[95] Morris also said that despite their rhetoric, Arab armies committed few atrocities and no large-scale massacre of prisoners took place when circumstances might have allowed them to happen, as when they took the Old City of Jerusalem or the villages of Atarot, Neve Yaakov, Nitzanim, Gezer and Mishmar Hayarden.
[99] With regard to massacres perpetrated by the IDF at the end of the war and particularly during Operation Hiram, Morris and Yoav Gelber consider that lack of discipline cannot explain the violence.
She thinks that during the period for which 'collective memory conflated with Palestinian nationalist mobilization, one exemplary event sufficed to express the tragedy'.
The village of Deir Yassin was located west of Jerusalem, but its strategic importance was debatable and its inhabitants had not participated in the war until one week before the attack.
Jacques de Reynier, head of the International Red Cross delegation in Palestine, visited Deir Yassin on April 11, 1948, and observed "a total of more than 200 dead, men, women, and children.
On 14 April, a convoy carrying medical personnel, some injured fighters, munitions and some reinforcement troops,[113][114] that was protected by Haganah soldiers and armoured cars,[115] tried to reach the enclave.
Following the incident, Jacques de Reynier urged that in future all convoys be relieved of military escorts and placed under Red Cross protection.
[116] While the whole event is usually seen as a massacre, Morris considers it to have been, rather, a battle, given that there was shooting between Arab and Haganah militia and targeted a supply convoy headed for Mount Scopus.
The first attack on Lydda occurred on the afternoon of 11 July when the 89th battalion mounted on armoured cars and jeeps raided the city "spraying machine-gun fire at anything that moved".
In the morning of 12 July, the situation was calm but around 11:30 an incident occurred; two or three armored cars entered the town and a firefight erupted.
[125] Alon Kadish and Avraham Sela write that it was "an intense battle where the demarcation between civilians, irregular combatants and regular army units hardly existed.