Al-Dawayima

Al-Dawayima spread along the top of a wide rocky ridge on the western side of the Hebron mountains, some eighteen kilometres from the city. Its 3,710 inhabitants in the 1944/45 government survey held more than 60,000 dunums, most of it rough grazing and rainfed cereal ground, and the village was organised into twenty-seven hamulas, each owning a few hundred head of sheep and goats. Its people were Muslims; a mosque stood at the centre, enlarged and given a tall minaret by the villagers in the 1930s and maintained by followers of the Khalwati Sufi order, and a domed shrine of Shaykh Ali on the ridge to the west drew visitors from the surrounding villages. An elementary school opened in 1937. From 1944 a weekly Friday market was held on the threshing floor, drawing traders from Bayt Jibrin, Hebron and Gaza; the villagers called it suq al-barrayn, the market of the two terrains, because it joined the produce of the hills to that of the plain.

In the second half of October 1948 Israel broke the second truce and launched Operation Yoav in the south. Egyptian troops withdrew from Bayt Jibrin towards Hebron on 27 October, and the people of Bayt Jibrin and al-Qubayba fell back on al-Dawayima. Two days later, as the village was finishing Friday prayers, the 89th commando battalion of the Eighth Armoured Brigade — a formation commanded by Yitzhak Sadeh, the founder of the Palmach — advanced from al-Qubayba with tanks and armoured cars, splitting into groups that attacked from the north, south and west. Fewer than two dozen armed men were in the village. The killing that followed took place in three stages: in the houses and alleys, in the mosque, and at a cave in the Tor al-Zagh area where families from al-Dawayima and al-Qubayba had taken shelter.

Two accounts survive from witnesses. The village mukhtar, Hasan Mahmud Ihdeib, described returning the following night and finding about sixty bodies in the mosque, most of them elderly men, his own father among them, and eighty-five bodies of men, women and children at the mouth of the Iraq al-Zagh cave; his testimony was sent in June 1949 to the UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine, and he repeated it to the Israeli paper Hadashot in 1984. The second account came from an Israeli soldier whose report reached the Mapam paper Al ha-Mishmar and was later used by Benny Morris, who quotes a participant saying that about eighty to a hundred people, women and children among them, were killed by the first wave. Investigations opened and closed without consequence beyond the disciplining of some soldiers and a new set of rules on the treatment of Arab civilians. In December 1948 the agriculture minister Aharon Zisling raised al-Dawayima before a ministerial committee on atrocities, saying that such acts determined the character of the nation.

The village was levelled after the war and its ground given over to cowsheds, chicken runs and granaries. The moshav of Amatzya was founded on the site in 1955. In 1984 the mukhtar was taken back for the first time and showed a journalist the cistern into which the dead had been gathered; labourers who dug there a few days later turned up human bones, including three skulls, one of them a child’s, and reburied them. The massacre went largely unexamined for more than three decades, and the site remains the subject of forensic and archival investigation.

Sources

• Al-Dawayima — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (palquest)
• Al-Dawayima, 29 October 1948 — palquest highlight
• Al-Dawayima — Zochrot
• The Massacre at Tur al-Zagh: al-Dawayima, 29 October 1948 — Forensic Architecture