We were only wearing the clothing we had on because we are coming back tomorrow. We are coming back. Now we just want to be far from the shooting.
An eight-year-old when Lifta was emptied in early 1948, he recalls fleeing with nothing but the clothes his family wore, certain they would be back the next day.
Yacoub Odeh was born in 1940 in Lifta, a prosperous village of some 3,000 people at the western entrance to Jerusalem. After months of attacks by Zionist militias — including a December 1947 gunfire and grenade assault on one of the village’s coffeehouses — his father put him, his mother and his siblings on a truck to Ramallah in late February 1948, staying behind to defend the village. Lifta was one of the first villages in the Jerusalem district to be depopulated.
Odeh, who heads the Lifta Cultural Heritage Protection Commission, still leads tours through the village’s ruins — the one depopulated Palestinian village Israel did not demolish after 1948 — and campaigns against plans to build a luxury development over its remains. He gave this account to journalist Jessica Buxbaum of MintPress News in July 2021.
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Quoted exactly as published by MintPress News (republished by Aletho News). Visit the archive for the full testimony.
MintPress News (republished by Aletho News)