Palestinians on Saturday marked the 68th anniversary of the massacre of more than 100 Palestinians civilians carried out by Zionist forces at the village of Deir Yassin.
Deir Yassin has long been a symbol of Israeli violence for Palestinians because of the particularly gruesome nature of the slaughter, which targeted men, women, children, and the elderly in the small village west of Jerusalem. The number of victims is generally believed to be around 107, though figures given at the time reached up to 254.
The Deir Yassin massacre was led by the Irgun group, whose head was future prime minister Menachem Begin, with support from the Haganah and Lehi.
The massacre was one of the first in what would become a long line of attacks in a number of Palestinian villages, part of a broader strategy called Plan Dalet by Zionist groups to scare Palestinians in the hope that the ensuing terror would lead to an Arab exodus, to ensure only Jews were left in the "Jewish state."
Thus the attack on Deir Yassin took place a month before Partition took place, and was part of the reasons later given by neighboring Arab states for their intervention in Palestine.
The combination of forced expulsion and flight that the massacres -- most prominent among them Deir Yassin -- precipitated left around 750,000 Palestinians as refugees abroad. Today their descendants number more than five million, and their right to return to Palestine is a central political demand.
The anniversary of the deadly razing of the village comes as modern day Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank continue to fight for their livelihood in the face of illegal Israeli settlement expansion, widespread detention campaigns, extrajudicial executions by Israeli forces, and a surge in housing demolitions -- most recently leaving 124 Palestinians homeless in a single day.
