The Battle of al-Qastal

In early April 1948, the hilltop village of al-Qastal, commanding the Tel Aviv–Jerusalem road, became the focus of the battle for the city’s western approaches. Facing it stood Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni, the Jerusalem-born commander who had founded the secret Organization for Holy Struggle in late 1933 and led the Army of the Holy War (Jaysh al-Jihad al-Muqaddas) through the revolt of 1936–39 and again in the war of 1948.

On 8 April 1948, moving through fog toward positions at al-Qastal, Abd al-Qadir was killed. His fighters retook the village in the fury that followed, but the Palmach recaptured it within days, and the loss of the movement’s most capable field commander broke something in the Palestinian defense of the Jerusalem corridor that was never repaired. He was buried at the Khatuniyya beside the al-Aqsa compound, where his father Musa Kazim al-Husayni — mayor of Jerusalem and head of the Palestine Arab Congress — already lay, and where his son, the Jerusalem political leader Faisal Husseini, would one day join him.

On 9 April, as Jerusalem mourned, fighters of the Irgun and Lehi attacked the village of Deir Yassin on the city’s western edge and massacred its inhabitants. The two blows fell within a day of each other, and together they mark the moment the military balance in the Jerusalem hills — and with it the fate of the villages along the corridor — turned decisively.