Haifa district · depopulated 1948 · 1 min read
Tantura
الطنطورة
Tantura, a coastal village south of Haifa, was captured in May 1948, when scores of its residents were killed — a massacre documented in Teddy Katz's contested thesis and revisited by Alon Schwarz's 2022 documentary "Tantura." The site now lies beneath the beaches of Dor.
See Tantura on the Atlas32.6094°N · 34.9177°E
Al-Tantura stood on a low rise above the Mediterranean shore, twenty-four kilometers south of Haifa, beside the ruins of the ancient harbor city of Dor. A spur road and a station on the coastal railway tied it to Haifa and the south; its people fished, grew grain and vegetables, and tended small orchards on the sandy plain. The 1945 British survey counted about 1,500 residents.
On the night of 22–23 May 1948, the Alexandroni Brigade took the village; most of its people were driven toward Tulkarm and the West Bank or expelled by sea. What happened in the hours after the surrender has been contested ever since. Teddy Katz’s 1998 University of Haifa master’s thesis, built largely on oral testimony from survivors and veterans, concluded that troops killed large numbers of unarmed villagers; a libel suit by veterans forced a brief retraction that Katz soon disavowed. Alon Schwarz’s 2022 documentary Tantura recorded former soldiers of the brigade describing killings of prisoners, reviving the affair. Estimates of the dead range from dozens to more than two hundred, and historians remain divided over the scale.
Almost nothing of the village stands today: moshav Dor occupies part of its lands, and the site itself serves the beaches of Dor and neighboring kibbutz Nahsholim. In 2023, a Forensic Architecture investigation commissioned by the legal center Adalah mapped what survivors describe as a mass grave beneath the beach parking lot — a patch of asphalt that has become, like the village itself, a battleground over what is allowed to be remembered.
Sources
Cited works
4- palestineremembered.com — index(opens in a new tab)https://www.palestineremembered.com/Haifa/al-Tantura/index.html
- zochrot.org — en(opens in a new tab)https://www.zochrot.org/villages/village_details/55025/en
- palquest.org — al tantura(opens in a new tab)https://www.palquest.org/en/place/16895/al-tantura
- en.wikipedia.org — Tantura(opens in a new tab)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tantura
Connected in the archive
21 connected records21 records elsewhere in the archive are linked to this one, each by a piece of evidence you can read below.
gave testimony about this village — 1 record
- Muhammad Abu Hana
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: village: "al-Tantura" → Tantura (Haifa)
named in this record — 2 records
One record names the other. A pointer for reading, not a claim that they belong to each other.
- Haifaحيفا
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Al-Tantura stood on a low rise above the Mediterranean shore, twenty-four kilometers south of Haifa, beside the ruins of the ancient harbor city of Dor.
- Tulkarmطولكرم
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: On the night of 22–23 May 1948, the Alexandroni Brigade took the village; most of its people were driven toward Tulkarm and the West Bank or expelled by sea.
names this place — 1 record
One record names the other. A pointer for reading, not a claim that they belong to each other.
- The Record of 1948
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: The village on the coast whose story was documented, denied, and documented again.
in the same district — 17 records
Filed near each other — the same Mandate district, or the same uncommon subject tags.
- Abu Shushaأبو شوشة
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: Both recorded in the Haifa district.
- Abu Zurayqأبو زريق
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: Both recorded in the Haifa district.
- Al-Kafraynالكفرين
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: Both recorded in the Haifa district.
- Al-Sindiyanaالسنديانة
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: Both recorded in the Haifa district.
- Al-Tiraالطيرة
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: Both recorded in the Haifa district.
- Ayn Ghazalعين غزال
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: Both recorded in the Haifa district.
- and 11 more
Cite this page
Every claim above carries its sources — citation is the point.
- Chicago
“Tantura.” Village Memory, FALASTEEN.AI. Accessed 22 August 2026. https://falasteen.ai/memory/tantura.- MLA
“Tantura.” Village Memory, FALASTEEN.AI, 2026, https://falasteen.ai/memory/tantura. Accessed 22 August 2026.- BibTeX
@misc{falasteen-tantura, title = {Tantura}, howpublished = {\url{https://falasteen.ai/memory/tantura}}, organization = {FALASTEEN.AI — A Living Archive for Palestine}, year = {2026}, note = {Accessed 2026-08-22} }