AL-QUDS (Dispatches) –
Palestinian families from Tantura village near Haifa, where Zionist troops carried out a massacre in 1948, have asked the occupying regime authorities to demarcate areas believed to be burial sites of mass graves, and allow them to visit.
The request was made by Adalah, the Haifa-based legal center, citing new evidence uncovered by a year-and-a-half-long Forensic Architecture (FA) investigation of mass graves at the present-day beach resort, some 30km south of Haifa.
“We are asking for the graves and cemeteries to be marked, to put an end to the desecration of the sites and to allow dignified visits of family members and religious ceremonies,” Suhad Bishara, Adalah’s director of Land and Planning Rights Unit, told Middle East Eye.
The request is believed to be the first of its kind, largely because it is the first massacre of many committed by Zionist troops during the Nakba to be investigated thoroughly, Bishara said.
Nakba, the Arabic word for “catastrophe”, refers to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Zionist militias to make way for the creation of the Zionist regime in 1948.
In a year-long premeditated military campaign, Zionist troops killed thousands of Palestinians, destroyed over 500 villages, forcibly expelled 80 percent of the population and captured 78 percent of historic Palestine, on which the occupying regime was established.
On the evening of 22 May 1948, Zionist troops attacked Tantura, a small fishing village of around 1,500 residents, as part of the offensive. Within hours, they “conducted a systematic massacre of disarmed Palestinian fighters and civilians”, writes FA in their report. Between 20 and 280 people are believed to have been executed.
Drawing on an ever-growing body of evidence and using 3D modeling, historic aerial photos and testimonies from survivors, FA identified two sites that are “very likely” mass graves and two others which are possibly mass graves.
“We don’t say it’s conclusive because, of course, we haven’t looked for the bodies there, but they are very likely, because the visual evidence and testimonial evidence correspond one to one,” said Shouredi Molavi, FA’s lead Palestine researcher.
“The other two sites are possible because there we see ground anomalies in the area where people said things have happened. So people were buried en masse or executions happened, but those sites don’t correspond one to one.”