PALESTINE Memories of 1948 - Photographs of Jerusalem | Page 70

gap on the eastern side, thus forcing the residents to flee
in that direction. The assault was carried out with mor-
tar fire and automatic weapons, without even giving
the villagers the opportunity to surrender. The Israeli
soldiers were methodical: they advanced like a dark
wave, opening up the houses one by one, emptying
their weapons into them without even looking. This
was the way they went about emptying a village of all
its occupants. 5 They knew that the survivors would flee
as the carnage got closer. And indeed, many families
ran to hide in the caves in the surrounding hillsides.
The soldiers asked where the mukhtar lived and went
straight to his house to blow it up, 6 along with those
around it where his extended family lived. In any case
in their eyes we are worth nothing, we are not even
human beings, we do not really exist. It’s as though they
have been brainwashed to believe that nothing that they
do to us can possibly matter.
Half an hour after having entered the village, two
tanks stopped in front of the Mosque of Daraw-
ish where 75 old people, mainly men, were gathered,
praying. Among them was my grandfather, Mahmoud
Ahmed Al Hudeib, who was 90. The old people had not
had time to run away, and in any case they had not even
considered it, believing that, given their age, the Israelis
would not harm them. The very idea that anyone, even
a soldier, would fire on old people praying to God is
inconceivable. All of them were executed on the spot.
Just outside Al Dawayima, the Israelis found 35 fam-
ilies hiding in the Iraq Al Zagh caves. 7 The villagers had
taken refuge in this huge space thinking it would be a
safe hiding place until the soldiers left. But the soldiers
found the caves easily. Most of the people were from Al
Dawayima but there were also some from Qubayba, 8
Beit Jibrin 9 and other places. Just like our family, they
had fled before the advancing tanks, but just a bit later.
Too late. Among them was a cousin of my father’s with
his wife and their four children.
At first the men came out of the hiding places. Some
of them had taken their old rifles with them, but most
were unarmed. They tied their keffiyahs 10 to sticks and
waved them to show they were surrendering. Then the
women and children came out. The soldiers ordered
them to line up in rows and then to come forward. As
the first steps were taken the firing started, in bursts, the
sound of the shooting drowning out the cries. When it
stopped everyone was on the ground. My cousin’s wife
and her little girl, whom she was holding in her arms,
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Memories of 1948
had also fallen down but had miraculously not been hit.
The rest of the family was wiped out. They stayed there,
lying among the bodies. Like the few others who sur-
vived, they waited there until the Israeli soldiers left and
night hid them. Then they ran towards another cave,
further away, where they found my uncle, the mukhtar.
They told him everything. They said that the soldiers
had selected three girls from the cave, three very beauti-
ful girls. One was holding a baby in one arm and hold-
ing on to her mother with her other hand. They killed
the baby and the mother and took the girl. They stood
her to one side with the two others they had taken, God
knows why. But they were screaming so much that in
the end the soldiers got annoyed and shot them too.
My uncle listened to the tale. All the men listened.
The following night they went back to look and found
the corpses in the village, in the mosque, in the caves.
They buried the bodies. 11 Some tried to go back to their
houses to fetch food and bedding but the Israeli sol-
diers were standing guard and fired. Many men were
wounded or killed. Henceforth, the Israeli soldiers had
control of all the area around Ajur, Beit Jibrin and Al
Dawayima to the west of Hebron. 12
When he realized that there was no going back, my
uncle, a good mukhtar, set himself two goals: first to
pay homage to the martyrs 13 and then to take care of
the living. Of the 6000 people living in Al Dawayima,
455 had been murdered. 14 He was not able to find out
how many people from the surrounding villages had
also been killed. Since May that year, many western
Palestinians and people from the coast had come to take
refuge in our midst. Perhaps as many as 4000 in all. In
our house we were sheltering a couple with a little girl
who had arrived on a donkey with just a few things in
a tiny bundle. They had lost everything the day that
the Zionists captured their village. We gave them warm
bread and some figs, and they drew water from our well.
Their faces were harrowed. I never saw them again after
that 29th October.
The survivors needed somewhere safe, a roof for the
winter, warm clothes, food. We set off towards Jericho 15 in
the Jordan valley on the West Bank, where the Red Cross
was setting up camps for us, the Palestinian refugees.
Along the road our group met up with thousands of
other people looking for a refuge. It was cold, especially
at night. We would cling to the olive trees to try to
find a little warmth. We were advancing like a swarm
of locusts, crying out our agony, which no one was