Village memory · Palestine

Umm al-Faraj

أم الفرج

Acre districtDepopulated 1948

Umm al-Faraj stood on the Acre plain ten and a half kilometres from the city, an orchard village where 745 of its 825 dunums were in citrus and bananas and sugar had been made since the Fatimid period. On 20–21 May 1948 the Carmeli Brigade attacked it in the second stage of Operation Ben-Ami; the brigade commander's operational orders named the village and directed his troops to "kill among the men" and to "destroy and burn the villages." Only the stone mosque remains, shut and decaying in tall grass.