Deir Yassin

Deir Yassin sat on a hill five kilometers west of Jerusalem’s Old City, a village of stone houses and quarries whose population grew from 428 in 1931 to about 750 by 1948. It was relatively prosperous and kept workable relations with its Jewish neighbors, doing business with the nearby suburb of Givat Shaul.

On the morning of 9 April 1948, fighters of the Irgun and Lehi attacked the village. What followed was one of the war’s worst atrocities: more than a hundred Palestinian men, women, and children were killed, most shot at close range — estimates of the dead range from about one hundred to two hundred and fifty. Survivors were driven out or trucked toward Jerusalem, and the village was looted. News of the massacre spread across Palestine and became one of the most powerful accelerants of the Palestinian exodus; within weeks, ‘Deir Yassin’ had entered the language as a warning.

The village’s houses were resettled by new Jewish immigrants within months, and the Jerusalem neighborhoods of Givat Shaul and Har Nof later rose on its lands. The surviving core of the village is used to this day by the Kfar Shaul psychiatric hospital. Each April, Zochrot and Palestinian partners hold a memorial at the site, reading aloud the names of the dead.

Sources

• Dayr Yasin — Palestine Remembered
• Dayr Yasin — Zochrot
• Deir Yassin — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest)
• Palestine Open Maps