The Jews were stationed here and there with loudspeakers and guns, loaded and ready. One loudspeaker repeated that we better leave in order to avoid what happened in the mosque.
A visually impaired teenager during the July 1948 expulsion from Lydda, he recalls being herded east on foot in the exodus that became known as the Lydda death march.
Reja-e Busailah was a teenager in Lydda when the city fell during Operation Dani in July 1948. After street fighting and a massacre in the Dahmash Mosque that left hundreds dead, Israeli forces ordered the inhabitants of Lydda and neighboring Ramla — some 70,000 people, swollen by refugees from Jaffa — to leave on foot toward Ramallah, a march in blazing Ramadan heat on which hundreds died of thirst and exhaustion.
Visually impaired, Busailah made the march relying on his hearing. He later became a professor of English literature in the United States and told the story of his childhood and expulsion in his memoir In the Land of My Birth: A Palestinian Boyhood (Institute for Palestine Studies, 2017). His testimony is excerpted in Palquest’s entry on the fall of Lydda.
Sources
Source
Quoted exactly as published by Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (Palquest). Visit the archive for the full testimony.
Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (Palquest)