At 9 in the morning, the shooting stopped and the attackers rounded everyone up on the beach. They sorted them out, the women and children on one side, the men on the other. They searched the men and ordered them to keep their hands above their heads.
A twelve-year-old during the assault on al-Tantura in May 1948 describes the roundup on the beach that preceded the killing of scores of the village's men.
Muhammad Abu Hana was born in 1936 in al-Tantura, a fishing and farming village on the coast south of Haifa. On the night of 22–23 May 1948 the village was attacked by the Alexandroni Brigade; after the shooting stopped, the population was rounded up on the beach, men separated from women and children, and groups of men were led away and shot. The survivors were expelled toward Fraydis and beyond.
His uncle, wounded in the attack, survived only because the mukhtar of the neighboring Jewish colony of Zichron Ya’akov intervened — the two mukhtars had been on good terms. Abu Hana ended up in the Yarmuk refugee camp in Damascus, where his testimony was recorded as part of a collection of eyewitness accounts of the Tantura massacre published by Palestine Remembered.
Sources
Source
Quoted exactly as published by Palestine Remembered. Visit the archive for the full testimony.
Palestine RememberedConnected in the archive
3 connected records3 records elsewhere in the archive are linked to this one, each by a piece of evidence you can read below.
the village this testimony is about — 1 record
- Tanturaالطنطورة
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: Muhammad Abu Hana was born in 1936 in al-Tantura, a fishing and farming village on the coast south of Haifa.
- Mukhtar
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: His uncle, wounded in the attack, survived only because the mukhtar of the neighboring Jewish colony of Zichron Ya'akov intervened — the two mukhtars had been on good terms.
Cite this page
Every claim above carries its sources — citation is the point.
- Chicago
“Muhammad Abu Hana — Testimony.” Testimonies, FALASTEEN.AI. Accessed 22 August 2026. https://falasteen.ai/testimonies/muhammad-abu-hana-al-tantura.- MLA
“Muhammad Abu Hana — Testimony.” Testimonies, FALASTEEN.AI, 2026, https://falasteen.ai/testimonies/muhammad-abu-hana-al-tantura. Accessed 22 August 2026.- BibTeX
@misc{falasteen-muhammad-abu-hana-al-tantura, title = {Muhammad Abu Hana — Testimony}, howpublished = {\url{https://falasteen.ai/testimonies/muhammad-abu-hana-al-tantura}}, organization = {FALASTEEN.AI — A Living Archive for Palestine}, year = {2026}, note = {Accessed 2026-08-22} }