The Jews ordered all our family to line up against the wall and they started shooting us. I was hit in the side, but most of us children were saved because we hid behind our parents. The bullets hit my sister Kadri [four] in the head, my sister Sameh [eight] in the cheek, my brother Mohammed [seven] in the chest. But all the others with us against the wall were killed: my father, my mother, my grandfather and grandmother, my uncles and aunts and some of their children.
A twelve-year-old survivor of the 9 April 1948 massacre at Deir Yassin describes the killing of her family, in a statement recorded by British police officers days after the attack.
Fahimi Zeidan was twelve years old when Irgun and Lehi fighters attacked Deir Yassin, west of Jerusalem, on 9 April 1948, killing more than one hundred villagers in an event that became the most notorious massacre of the 1948 war and a powerful driver of Palestinian flight.
Her statement belongs to a dossier of survivor accounts recorded by British CID officers, with medical corroboration, about four days after the village’s capture. The dossier was classified “Secret” and not made generally available for twenty-five years; journalists Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre drew on it for their 1972 book O Jerusalem!, and it is published online by Deir Yassin Remembered.
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Quoted exactly as published by Deir Yassin Remembered. Visit the archive for the full testimony.
Deir Yassin Remembered