al-Kabri incident

The al-Kabri incident refers to a military operation carried out by Israeli forces during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War in retaliation for the ambush of the Yehiam convoy. On May 20, 1948, the Israeli Carmeli Brigade captured al-Kabri (Arabic: الكابري), an Arab village in the north-west corner of the region of Palestine that was later incorporated into the State of Israel. On March 27, 1948, hundreds of armed villagers and units of the ALA attacked a Jewish convoy near the village killing forty-nine Jews. Six Arabs were also killed in the battle. Two months later, the commander of the Operation Ben Ami, gave operational orders given that day were to "attack with the aim of conquest, the killing of adult males, [and] the destruction and torching of the villages of Kabri, Umm al Faraj and Al-Nahr." According to Meron Benvenisti, "The orders were carried out to the letter."

Al-Kabri was captured without any resistance and it was almost immediately depopulated. It was treated particularly harshly due to the villagers involvement with the destruction of the Jewish convoy. An 'undisclosed number of villagers were taken prisoner and some were killed', others were killed during their dispersal in Galilee when it was discovered that they had come from al-Kabri.

Published Accounts of the Incident

According to a Palestinian publication, Dov Yirmiya, who was company commander in the 21st battalion, reported:

Kabri was conquered without a fight. Almost all inhabitants fled. One of the soldiers, Yehuda Reshef, who was together with his brother among the few rescapees from the Yehi'am convoy, got hold of a few youngsters who did not escape, probably seven, ordered them to fill up some ditches dug as an obstacle and then lined them up and fired at them with a machine gun. A few died but some of the wounded succeeded to escape. The battalion commander did not react. Reshef was a brave fighter and as a rescapee from the Yehi'am convoy, enjoyed special status in the battalion. He advanced later to the grade of Brigadier General. He justified his action as an act of revenge.

Another Arab publication speaks of Aminah Muhammad Musa, a villager woman, who allegedly reported:

My husband and I left Kabri the day before it fell... At dawn [the next day], while my husband was preparing for his morning prayer, our friend Raja passed us and urged us to proceed, saying that we should run... It was not too long before we were met by the Jews... They took us and a few other villagers... in an armoured car back to the village. There a Jewish officer interrogated us and, putting a gun to my husband's neck, he said "You are from Kabri?"... The Jews took away my husband, Ibrahim Dabajah, Hussain Hassan al-Khubaizah, Khalil al-Tamlawi, Uthman Iban As'ad Mahmud, and Raja. They left the rest of us... An officer came to me and asked me not to cry. We slept in the village orchards that night. The next morning, Umm Hussain and I went to the village... I saw Umm Taha on the way to the village courtyard. She cried and said "You had better go see your dead husband." I found him. He was shot in the back of the head.

Bibliography

• Mêrôn Benveniśtî (2000), Sacred landscape: the buried history of the Holy Land since 1948, University of California Press, ISBN 9780520234222
• Khalidi, Walid (1992), All That Remains, Washington D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, ISBN 0887282245
• Morris, Benny (2004), The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0521009677, 9780521009676 {{citation}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help)
• Nazzal, Nafez (1978), The Palestinian Exodus from Galilee 1948, The Institute for Palestine Studies

External links and references

• Research guide to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict