Ismail Shammout was born in 1931 in Lydda and was eighteen when Israeli forces occupied the city in July 1948, during Ramadan. Along with his eight brothers and sisters — one of whom died of thirst on the way — he was driven out on foot toward Ramallah with some 70,000 people from Lydda, Ramla and the surrounding towns, in what Palestinians remember as the “death march.” Interviewed later by the historian Michael Palumbo, he recalled spotting water in the blazing heat and rushing to fill a pot before a Zionist officer held a gun to his head and ordered him to put it down; he saw people chewing grass for moisture and others drinking their children’s urine, and pregnant women delivering by the roadside babies who did not survive.

Shammout survived the march and became one of Palestine’s most celebrated visual artists — his 1950s paintings of the expulsion, later destroyed in the 1982 siege of Beirut, became icons of the Nakba. With his wife, the artist Tamam al-Akhal, he documented Palestinian history on canvas for decades, and he co-wrote with her the book Palestine: The Exodus and the Odyssey. He died in 2006.

Sources

• Lydda, 9–13 July 1948 — Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (PalQuest) (testimony related from Michael Palumbo’s interview with Shammout)