Tantura mass graves and execution site identified in new investigation

By Al Mayadeen English
Source: News websites
25 May 2023 14:10

A new investigation conducted by Forensic Architecture identifies the location of two sites of mass graves and one execution site dating back to the Nakba of Tantura, Occupied Palestine.

The mass grave from the 1948 Tantura massacre, Palestine, under the car park behind the beach. (Wikimedia Commons)

In 2022, Haaretz confirmed, in a report, what Arabs have been saying for decades: Israeli soldiers took part in a massacre in 1948, in the Palestinian village of Tantura. At the time, the report revealed that occupation soldiers had admitted, decades later, to the mass killing of Palestinian civilians.

More recently, Forensic Architecture, based at Goldsmiths, University of London, identified three new possible mass grave sites in historic Tantura, which served to eliminate evidence of the Palestinian village, and erase its history, in preparation to the proclamation of the creation of "Israel".

The newly-discovered mass graves are expected to be located beneath a "present-day beach resort."

Palestinian survivors and historians, as written in The Guardian, "have long claimed that men living in Tantura, a fishing village of approximately 1,500 people near Haifa, were executed after surrendering to the Alexandroni Brigade and their bodies dumped in a mass grave believed to be located under an area that is now a car park for Dor Beach."

The investigation estimated that between 40 to 200 people were killed by the Alexandroni Brigade, one of the Haganah brigades, and buried at each site.

According to The Guardian, the extensive investigation conducted recently "analyzed cartographic data and aerial photos from the British mandate era, cross-referenced with archival and newly collected eyewitness testimonies from survivors and perpetrators and Israeli [occupation] army records."

In July, "Israel" committed its biggest massacre in #Palestine where more than 400 #Palestinian women, men, and children were slaughtered by Zionist gangs. pic.twitter.com/YxoUZwehm5
— Al Mayadeen English (@MayadeenEnglish) July 14, 2022

The data, it said, was utilized to construct 3D models that may be used to locate execution sites, mass graves, the borders of old cemeteries, and whether any graves have been unearthed or moved.

While the Tantura mass grave was previously thought to have been located in an open field, today, the new assessment located the mass grave under an Israeli parking lot.

The second burial site is also expected to be beneath a car park lot. According to the report, the aerial photographs of both locations "appear to have been long, thin earth features about 3 meters by 30 meters long, oriented along an east-west axis, and at the northern boundary of an open field."

In turn, the execution site, the investigation underscored, would have been in a courtyard behind the house of the Haj Yahya family, a Palestinian family indigenous to Tantura. The report also noted that human remains have been reportedly found at the site, years later.

Significantly, Forensic Architecture announced that the Tantura project will be the first of a number of visual investigations to be conducted with the aim of identifying and revealing the truth of the massacres committed by the Israeli Occupation Forces during the Nakba.

Mass grave in Palestine: Israeli soldiers admit to massacre

An Israeli director collected testimonies from Israeli soldiers that were present during the massacre in a documentary film entitled "Tantura".

Moshe Diamant, one of the soldiers who finally admitted to the massacre, was reported as saying, "It mustn’t be told, it could cause a whole scandal. I don’t want to talk about it, but it happened. What can you do? It happened."

The villagers, according to Diamant, were shot to death by a savage using a submachine gun after the battle was over.

Another soldier said, "It’s not nice to say this. They put them into a barrel and shot them in the barrel. I remember the blood in the barrel."

"It could cause a whole scandal."
Israeli soldiers that took part in a massacre in 1948 at the Palestinian village of Tantura have admitted to a mass killing of #Palestinian civilians after decades.
Can you imagine the number of massacres that “Israel” has denied? #Palestine pic.twitter.com/VYnPUkqba3
— Al Mayadeen English (@MayadeenEnglish) January 28, 2022

The soldiers' testimonies, which were collected by director Alon Schwarz for his documentary, show that the victims were buried in a mass grave, which is now under a parking lot at "Dor Beach", south of Haifa.

The Israeli massacre had been described in detail by Palestinian historians but had been consistently denied by "Israel", which never recognized what happened.

“The fate of Tantura was sealed long before the night of its fall. It was one of the tens of Palestinian villages and towns inside and outside the boundaries of the UN-envisaged Jewish state specifically targeted for capture under the notorious Plan Dalet, the Haganah master plan for the military establishment of Israel on the largest area possible of Palestine.”

- Journal of Palestine Studies, 2001.

An Israeli researcher by the name of Teddy Katz also described the massacre in his master's thesis at Haifa University. He had written about how more than 200 Palestinian villagers were shot dead after they surrendered.

It is worth noting that Israeli occupation soldiers from the Alexandroni Brigade later filed a lawsuit against Katz, and forced him to retract his account of the massacre.