Arabs Claim Capture Of Kastel, but Jews Say Town Is Theirs

By the Associated Press, Jerusalem

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“JERUSALEM, April 12.—The see-saw battle for Kastel reached a verbal stand-off today. Both Jews and Arabs claimed the hilltop fortress which commands part of the vital Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway… Irgun Zvai Leumi and the Stern Gang—Jewish extremist groups—still hold the strategic village of Deir Yassin, which they took Friday.

Deir Yassin is near Kastel. Both Arabs and Jews describe the extremist attack on the village as ‘a horrible massacre.’ A Red Cross investigation showed many women and children were among the 254 Arab dead there.

The Arab Higher Committee asked Moslems and Christians everywhere to ‘consider the facts of the massacre of innocent people by Jews at Deir Yassin and to decide the world’s reaction to it.’ The committee’s general secretary, Dr.

Hussein el Khalidi, said: ‘Deir Yassin, where this outrage occurred, is practically the only (Arab) village in the Jerusalem area which had not yet appealed to any Arab authority as being in danger of Jews. In the early morning Friday they (the Jews) swooped in and practically exterminated women, children and old men.

The only ones who managed to escape were the young men. After that massacre in which some 250 were killed by guns and grenades the remaining 150 women and children were dumped into trucks, paraded through Jewish areas, spat on and stoned.’

A Jewish Agency spokesman said Hagana members in Jerusalem rescued a number of the Arab women and children and turned them over to the British. The spokesman said the Agency had cabled Trans-Jordan’s King Abdullah the text of its statement repudiating the Irgun-Stern massacre.

He also released a statement by the Chief Rabbinate, describing the killings as a ‘foul crime.’ The statement called on Irgun and the Stern Gang to ‘realize the depth of the shame you have inflicted on Jewry, to whom such acts are utter abomination.’

In a government hospital here, 12-year-old Fahimeh Ali Moustafa Zeidan, who suffered a grenade wound in the Deir Yassan attack, told her story of what happened in the village. She lost her mother, her grandmother, her grandfather, two brothers and a baby sister, 3 months old. ‘The whole village was asleep,’ she said.

‘About 500 Jews with heavy guns and tanks started attacking. Our 30 or 40 guards tried to stop them, but it was useless.’ The crying of her baby sister betrayed the family after they hid, she said, and then: ‘The put us all in line, my old grandmother included, and shouted insults at us. They started firing with Bren guns.

Some of us ran away and got back into the house and hid. The Jews came in and took our olives and lemons and turned all the jars over. This was about 9 o’clock in the morning. They took us to the edge of the village and made us stand there until 5 o’clock in the afternoon and just laughed when the older women asked for food for the children.

They searched the village for men and shot them dead when they found them. Two trucks came for us about 7 o’clock and we were hauled through Givate Shaul (a Jewish suburb), where the Jews laughed at us and mocked us. Then they drove us into the main road of town and made us get out. They told us: ‘Give us everything you’ve got or we’ll shoot you.’

Then the men formed a circle and the Jewish girls stripped us naked and took our rings and earrings. While we were naked they made pictures of us and then told us to get dressed and walk to Jaffa Gate (Jerusalem).’”

Context added by this archive

Four days after Deir Yassin, an American daily gives a twelve-year-old girl five paragraphs in her own words, under the subheading “Baby’s Cry Betrayed Family.” The same column carries the Arab Higher Committee, the Red Cross count, the Jewish Agency’s repudiation and the Chief Rabbinate calling it a foul crime.

The paper sets the village “Deir Yassan” in the sentence that introduces her and “Deir Yassin” everywhere else.

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"Arabs Claim Capture Of Kastel, but Jews Say Town Is Theirs," Evening Star, 12 April 1948, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1948-078. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1948-078