Abbas Abdulmalik
“I MAKE no apologies for retelling this horrible story. It happened. All should know what happens in war, and the world should know the guilty.”
Abbas Abdulmalik
Source: The Daily Telegraph (Sydney), June 12, 1948.
RONALD MONSON, In Jerusalem
JEWISH mortar bombs were coming over the Damascus Gate, bursting with shuddering explosions in narrow alleys, when I visited the Jacob E. Spoffore Memorial Hospital — American Institution — close by the Gate today (Wednesday).
I had come to visit the Arab orphans from Deir Yassin. I carried no sweets, because their nurse, Miriam Bedrossian, doesn’t think sweets are good for year-old babies.
Miriam had cared for these 15 babies since they were brought to the refuge a few days after the massacre of their parents last March. There were 16, but one died of wounds — aged nine months.
To see grave-faced, black-eyed Bahir playing with her doll in her cot, coffee-hued Yunis dealing with his bottle, and little Emine registering her two-tooth smile, you would think that such mites would be safe, even should drunken savages be turned loose upon them.
But not a bit of it! A British burial party recovered their brothers and sisters, and other babies like them, from the death well of Deir Yassin, where the soldiers of Zion had cast them. Searchers also recovered the bodies of their mothers and fathers.
From this hospital ward to the shambles of the destroyed village of Deir Yassin seems a long way, but the Via Dolorosa these bits of humanity travelled is only about seven miles long
I MAKE no apologies for retelling this horrible story. It happened. All should know what happens in war, and the world should know the guilty.
Deir Yassin was a little Arab settlement surrounded by Jewish settlements some three miles beyond the outskirts of the Holy City, about a mile off the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv road.
For years, pictures and stories of it had featured in Jewish propaganda handouts as evidence of how harmoniously Arabs and Jews could live together.
It was true. The Jews and the Arabs lived in that area on the best of terms. The Jews were exceedingly good to the Arabs, and the Arabs liked the Jews.
Then came the disturbances. Arab and Jew began undeclared war. On March 9 Abdul Kader el Hosseini, Arab Liberation Army leader, was killed in fighting in the village of Kastel.
Next day — Friday, a Moslem religious holiday — Arabs bore his body to the Mosque of Omar, in the Old City, for burial.
Hundreds of Arab irregular army men from the villages around Jerusalem attended the ceremony, leaving the villages insecurely guarded. Deir Yassin was one of the villages left without sufficient protection.
Jews saw their opportunity. Men of the army of Zion attacked Deir Yassin at 10 a.m. that day.
They easily overcame the opposition. They killed 20 Arab defenders, and entered the village, tossing grenades into houses.
They killed old men, women, and children with bayonets. For three hours the slaughter went on.
Babies were killed in front of their mothers. Mothers’ throats were slit. Some were beheaded.
A group of men and women — some of the women obviously pregnant — were lined up and shot. The bloodlusting Jewish soldiery desecrated the bodies of pregnant mothers with knives.
When they had murdered 264 villagers, the Jews called a halt. They rounded up four truckloads of survivors of all ages and both sexes, tossed the bodies of the dead into the village well, and drove off with the survivors.
The victorious Jews drove the survivors through Jewish areas as exhibits of victory while Jews spat upon them. The parade continued, with breaks, for two days. Then the captors drove the survivors to the vicinity of the Italian hospital, in the new Jerusalem, and released them.
Exhausted mothers, some clasping babies, trudged to the Lion Gate leading to the Arab quarter of the Old City, where an Arab women’s charitable organisation collected them and cared for them.
On hearing the news, King Abdullah sent food and clothing and £500, and ordered the Transjordan Legation to care for them.
So Bahir, Yunis, and Emine came to the refuge of Spofford Hospital. Taha, 18 months, who was wounded, is recovering. None of them, nor the 11 other surviving babies, will ever know their fathers. and few of them their mothers.
A BULLET pinged through a glass door of the ward as I was there. Nurse Bedrossian decided to move her charges downstairs for greater safety. The cots were taken down; but hardly had the move been completed when bullets shattered both glass doors of the lower ward.
Then the firing died down, and the nurse decided she could leave the babies downstairs.
Her greatest lack, she told me, was fuel for heating the babies’ bottles. Her kerosene was almost exhausted; but that matter is now being attended to.
The massacre of Deir Yassin is now part of the history of this sorry war; but there is no evidence that the Jewish State has made any inquiries to discover who instigated it, or made any attempt to punish the guilty.
Until the Jewish State has done that, Arabs — and others — must believe that the Jewish Ieaders have condoned it.
Source: https://abbasabdulmalik.substack.com/p/they-massacred-arab-babies-1948
