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
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Quoted exactly as published by Palestine Remembered. Visit the archive for the full testimony.
Palestine Remembered