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 the British Mandate of Palestine that was later incorporated into the State of Israel. On March 27, 1948, hundreds of armed villagers and units of the Arab Liberation Army attacked a Jewish convoy near the village killing forty-nine Jews. Six Arabs were also killed in the battle. According to Meron Benvenisti, two months later, the commander of the Operation Ben-Ami, gave operational orders given that day were to "attack with the aim of capturing, the villages of Kabri, Umm al Faraj and Al-Nahr, to kill the men [and] and to destroy and set fire to the villages." Meron Benvenisti further states that "the orders were carried out to the letter."

According to a Palestinian publication, 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. According to Walid Khalidi, 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.

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