...one early morning around thirty trucks entered the village, the soldiers was dressed Arabian style, so we thought they are Arabs coming to defend us, but they began shooting every one they saw. Most of the residences escaped to the north, because the Zionists made a save side in the north to kick out everyone, we escaped to Lebanon, through Albassa and Tarshiha. After we left the village the Zionists destroyed all the village except the mosque and old Romanian building.
A refugee from al-Sumayriyya, between Acre and Nahariya, describes the 1948 capture of his village and his family's flight to Lebanon and Syria, in a letter to a Jewish student.
Zakaria Elnatour is a refugee from al-Sumayriyya, a village on the coastal plain between Acre and Nahariya. In 1948 armed men in Arab dress entered the village early one morning and opened fire; the inhabitants fled north through al-Bassa and Tarshiha into Lebanon, and the village was destroyed except for its mosque and one old building. His own family was moved on from Lebanon to Syria, later returning to the Ein al-Hilweh refugee camp near Sidon, where most of the village’s people settled.
He wrote this account in 2009 as a letter to Gil Shner, a Jewish student who had asked him about his village, answering in English because his computer could not type right to left. The letter, in his own unedited words, was published in Zochrot’s booklet Remembering al-Sumayriyya and on the organization’s website.