Yossi Schwartz ISL (RCIT section in Israel/Occupied Palestine) 05.06.2026
Israeli historian Adam Raz uploaded an incriminating document about the Zionist atrocities during the war of 1967 by the Zionist monster. Sometimes the idea arises among Israelis who are aware of the atrocities and hope to stop them by announcing that the Palestinians are laying down their arms. Aside from the fact that if an Israeli raises this position, he will be suspected of being a member of the Shin Bet, this is a basic lack of understanding of the Zionists, since Israeli gunmen have no problem murdering Palestinians without weapons, as Raz’s article proves.
He writes today in Haaretz: https://www.haaretz.co.il/magazine/2026-06-04/ty-article-magazine/.highlight/0000019e-88b8-d0a9-a7df-b9baa91e0000
The Israeli public is beginning to internalize the atrocities committed by the IDF during the War of Independence. The time has come to get to know the forgotten chapter of the Six-Day War as well.
“At first I didn’t agree to execute Arabs who didn’t object,” said one soldier. We’ve gone through a process where we’ve stopped seeing them as human beings.”
A second soldier explained that in Gaza, “human lives have not been played. You could kill, there was no law. No one would say a word to you, but it’s a bad feeling. It mainly kills the human image.”
A third soldier spoke of “punitive campaigns that we used to carry out in the minority villages in the Gaza Strip, not once or twice. We grabbed guys, put them up and eliminated them. In retrospect, it looks like murder.”
“We used to walk around refugee camps in Gaza and do cleansing,” a fourth soldier testified. “Every man we saw is a soldier, that’s clear. You can’t prove it. Maybe it’s killing prisoners or civilians. Every soldier who walked around there made a ‘concentration camp,’ and they didn’t hesitate to kill people who were a little disturbed.”
“It’s a philosophical debate,” said a fifth soldier about trying to distinguish between “the urge to kill and the instinct for sports.”
These testimonies, which never saw the light of day, came up in the discourse of the fighters that took place on the kibbutzim after the Six-Day War. A selection of the conversations was compiled in a canonical book, but many harsh testimonies were omitted and left out. Mor Lushi’s film from a decade ago, “Fighters’ Discourse: The Hidden Reels,” did expose some of the crimes committed in 1967, but the vast majority of them remained on the floor of the editing room.
“Out of the 200 hours of recording, a significant number of hours deal with war crimes,” Lushi said upon the film’s release. “The story came up in almost every kibbutz and repeated itself over and over again. We put three or four testimonies into the film about the killing of prisoners.”
A perusal of the full transcripts, which are in the Yad Tabenkin archive in Ramat Efal, is shocking and shows how deep the chasm is between the collective memory in Israel and what really happened. These protocols, along with a series of documents published here for the first time, are the basis of an investigation by the Haaretz Supplement and a study by the Akevot Institute on what took place during the Six-Day War and the days that followed. The historical investigation shows that Israel expelled and fled some 300,000 Arabs from the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan. And as in 1948, the expulsion included the killing of civilians, the sowing of terror in Arab communities, looting, and finally destruction.
In the weeks following the war, thousands of Palestinian refugees sought to return to the West Bank after finding refuge east of the Jordan River. However, IDF forces ambushed and massacred the returnees. The killing of the Palestinians who wanted to return was not made public, but reached the ears of Knesset member Uri Avnery. A nightmarish soldier who met Avnery told him that he and his friends had been instructed to open fire on women and children as well. After taking testimony from another soldier, Avnery turned to IDF Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin to open an investigation and order an end to the killing.
Avnery did not publish the remarks in his newspaper “Olam Hazeh” and did not speak about it from the Knesset podium. Like others, he remained silent and waited five decades until he put it in his autobiographical book:
“Every night, Arabs cross the Jordan River from the East Bank to the West Bank. We blocked these passages, and were ordered to shoot in order to kill, without warning. Indeed, such shots were fired every night at men, women and children, even on moonlit nights, when the fetuses could be identified. In other words, to differentiate between men and women and children. In the morning, we would go out to search the area, and we would kill the living, including those who were hiding and wounded, according to the explicit order of the officer who was present. After the killing was over, we would cover the bodies with dirt until a tractor arrived.”
“They explained to us that if convoys of refugees returning from Jordan to the West Bank pass by, we have to shoot them,” another soldier testified. “I asked the officer: And if I hear babies crying, should I shoot too? The answer I got was: Don’t be a girl.”
Uzi Narkis, the head of the Central Command in the war, admitted that the fighters were instructed to shoot the captives in order to kill, if they did not know what the slogan was. And how will Palestinian refugees know which slogan will save them from death? “Sometimes there are guys who exaggerate their behavior and instead of asking a slogan, they immediately shoot,” Narkis told the newspaper “Main Headline” in 1985. “When there is a war, tragic things happen.”
The IDF itself reported that by the beginning of September, nearly 150 Palestinians had been killed in this way, and Chief of Staff Rabin also confirmed in the Ministerial Committee for Security Affairs that these were the orders regarding “infiltrators.” These orders were in line with the government’s June 25 decision to prevent the return of refugees who had crossed the Jordan River eastward.
Back to the Conversation Fighters. “Let’s say we have to treat the Arabs this way,” says one of the soldiers, “the question is whether it doesn’t omit a very large, moral ground from all the things we say within ourselves. I’m not a big vegetarian, but this version of killing like that, it has to have consequences later in our lives.”
Afterwards, he told of a “Jordanian boy” who stood on the side of the road for a long time in the group, until soldiers “knocked a bundle on him and told me with complete enthusiasm that they had finished it.” He knew how to report a large “harvest” that had been made elsewhere, but he did not elaborate on it.
Another participant in the conversation compared the behavior of regular soldiers to reservists. “Regular soldiers kill much more easily. The regulars do terrible things. They literally murdered, they shot the captives even when they gave up.” He added that he was present at the execution of “some 15 guys” who were unarmed.
Testimonies of this kind appear in transcripts over and over again. One soldier said he had watched “cases that shocked me badly of executions and things like that.” A reservist spoke of explicit orders to execute Palestinians taken prisoner: “It wasn’t a trial, but there was an officer from the Military Government, from the Intelligence, I know exactly where it came from? He would go by and look through the documents and say, ‘This should be executed,’ without any wisdom.”
The murders were not always intended to expedite the deportation or to get rid of prisoners. One soldier told of an incident that took place in northern Sinai, in the Lake Bradwell Lagoon. The soldier and his comrades encountered seven Arabs, clearly civilians, sitting on a small sailboat. According to him, the “compassionate nurse” who accompanied them was “immediately excited” and offered to snipe them from a distance. “Hurry up, they’re Arabs!” she warned the fighters. Some of the force cocked his weapon and the soldier innocently thought “the guys were laughing.” When he realized they were serious, he shouted at the officer: “You’re not going to shoot, do you hear?” “The first bundle came out and immediately everyone else joined in and made a real shooting range,” he continued in his testimony. The occupants of the boat jumped into the water wounded, “and out of pity I said to someone, ‘Well, shoot them already.'”
Some 300,000 Arabs were expelled and smuggled out of the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan in 1967. Israel tried to claim that the Arabs left voluntarily, but the protocols teach otherwise. A document obtained by Haaretz shows that the Foreign Ministry’s legal advisor warned that “the deportations violate the Geneva Convention,” but “the Ministerial Committee for Security Affairs decided to approve the policy anyway.”
“We have turned the Sinai Peninsula into a killing valley,” another soldier wrote to his girlfriend, saying that people were executed even though they were not carrying weapons, and that this happened in the case of both captured soldiers and civilians. “I’ve seen too many murders to cry.” This was not a deviation from the line. In one of the most shocking cases in which prisoners were executed, the order was given by Moshe Levy, a staff officer in the paratroopers. Later, Levy was appointed chief of staff.
Some of the affairs are hidden from the Israeli public to this day, even though most of them were published abroad, as was the case with Moshe Levy and the killing of the prisoners, as well as in the case of testimonies of the killing of four civilians in Rafah after the end of the fighting. A document obtained by Haaretz shows that even in 2008, four decades later, State Archivist Yehoshua Freundlich recommended continuing to close “the case concerning an incident that took place in Rafah after the Six-Day War,” claiming that “exposing it could cause serious damage to Israel’s foreign relations.” The material on the affair is still closed in the IDF Archives.
The euphoria that accompanied the quick victory in the Six-Day War blurred the Nakba of 1967. In the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, they were expelled and smuggled as:200,000 Palestinians, many of them residents of refugee camps who had already been expelled from their homes two decades earlier. Arab communities along the Green Line were destroyed in order to blur the border between Israel and Jordan. Some 120,000 Syrian civilians were expelled and smuggled out of the Golan, and they were forbidden to return to their homes when the fighting subsided. Their settlements were plundered to the ground in an organized manner by the state. In some cases, private looting initiatives preceded state looting.
Documents that have been opened for review in the archives in recent years and uncovered by the Akevot Institute show that the IDF has been engaged in meticulous preparations for “the occupation of areas outside the borders of the state” since the early 1960s. The military hoped that the political situation would play in Israel’s favor and allow it to hold the occupied territory for an extended period of time, and estimated that in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and northern Sinai, “there may be a need for a long-term military government, in accordance with political trends.” The occupation of the territories did not catch Israel unprepared, as a kind of by-product of its achievements on the battlefield. On the contrary, the state has prepared for this.
The Palestinians were in this story. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan wrote in his memoirs that the Palestinians who lived in the West Bank did not take part in the war, and that it was not their war. However, they are the ones who paid the price.
The public, for its part, remained silent. Combatants who participated in the commission of crimes shut their mouths; A large public that looted and stole property did not want to boast about it; Kibbutzim that took part in the expulsion of Palestinians and the seizure of their property sought to conceal their actions. Amos Keinan, then a reservist who served in Latrun, was one of the few who openly wanted to protest the expulsion and the destruction of the villages, when he wrote a report on the destruction to Prime Minister Levi Eshkol.
However, the political echelon was not a drag on the military echelon. More than once he knew how to signal to the army with a wink that he wanted to expel the Arab population. “We also want to evacuate some of the Gaza Strip,” Moshe Dayan said at a ministerial meeting in July 1967, according to a document that was opened for review a few years ago. Yigal Allon expressed a similar mood. At a meeting of the Ministerial Committee for Security Affairs, Allon said that “there is no regret about how many villages were destroyed.” It wasn’t just a reflection of seeing things in retrospect. The work of deportation was in full swing at the time.
Information Minister Yisrael Galili said at the Cabinet meeting that “no hasbara will correct” what he saw during a visit to the West Bank. He added, “Our main thesis was that we were in danger of annihilation. This thesis has depreciated to a minimum.”
The expulsion, as Yishai Amrami, the deputy commander of a battalion that fought in the Six Day War, was planned. In 1987, Amrami participated in a conference of Mapam activists on the 20th anniversary of the publication of “Fighters’ Dialogue.” The activists, now 50 years old, were now watching the events of the war from a distance. “This thing, which I experienced firsthand, was an attempt to transfer the population massively,” Amrami recalled. “Not such a light deportation, but bus transportation. It’s something that remains etched in my memory to this day. I don’t know all the details, but it was clear that such a move was being carried out.”
Still, we are asked – who gave the order? Some 200,000 Palestinian refugees have sought refuge east of the Jordan River, and we have no documentation of a government decision on the matter, although it is clear that ministers have welcomed the fugitive. The two key figures are apparently Defense Minister Dayan and the head of the Central Command, Narkis. On June 7, Dayan made it clear to Chief of Staff Rabin that he wanted to empty the West Bank of its residents. Throughout those days, he repeatedly expressed his satisfaction with reports of the expulsion and departure of Arab residents. For example, when he learned of the beginning of the flight of the residents of the city of Tulkarm, which was home to 25,000 people, he ordered the advance of the armored corps to slow down, and demanded that the traffic arteries be kept open in order to facilitate the flight of the residents.
Moshe Dayan was eager to divorce, but he was not alone. Yigal Alon said that “ן להצטער על כמה כפרים שנהרסו”. Information Minister Yisrael Galili said that “no hasbara will correct” what he saw during a visit to the West Bank. He added, “Our main thesis was that we were in danger of annihilation. This thesis has depreciated to a minimum.”
In the government discussions, Dayan refrained from speaking unequivocally, and it is clear that this helped him deceive some of the ministers. Mordechai Bentov, Mapam’s Minister of Housing, later said that to the best of his knowledge, most of the expulsion initiatives were local, and that the great expulsions of 1948 did not repeat themselves because, as far as he knew, there was no order from above. “I don’t think so,” he said with some hesitation in a 1976 interview, “as far as I know. I know they ran away.”
The truth was more complicated. Maj. Gen. Narkis understood Dayan’s intentions well and acted decisively to expel the settlements along the Green Line. More than once, in places where the Palestinians did not try on their own initiative, they were demanded to do so. The evidence from the Palestinian side supports the evidence from the Israeli side. For example, the testimony of a resident of the village of Yalu at the outskirts of the Jerusalem Hills, which is kept in the archives of the Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq: “The Israelis are in the village and are announcing through the loudspeakers. All the residents of Yalu must leave for Ramallah. Those who do not leave will be in danger.”
Various practices to encourage the expulsion were employed in various places: making announcements, threatening residents with weapons, stationing buses and trucks, and ordering the population to board them. This was the case, among other things, in Qalqilya, the villages of Latrun, Tulkarm and the South Hebron Hills. Elsewhere in the West Bank, the air force bombings carried out as part of the fighting helped intimidate. These bombings helped smuggle out some 50,000 residents who lived in three refugee camps in the Jericho area. Many of the escapees carried in their memories the events of the Nakba and did not wait for the arrival of the infantry forces.
In some cases, there was an attempt to create the impression that the expulsion or flight was the result of local initiatives. An archival document kept by Tabenkin and now exposed here sheds light on the attempt to expel the residents of Qalqiliya, while blurring traces. In the document, Yaakov Mali, head of Egged’s Traffic Division during the war, testifies that the person who tried to carry out the expulsion was the mayor of Kfar Saba, Ze’ev Geller. “He ordered 40 buses from me to deport the residents of Qalqilya to the Jordan transit camps,” Mali said, testifying that he replied that he only received orders from the IDF. Geller replied that there was “a historic opportunity to get rid of as many Arabs as possible, and that at that very moment the IDF is blowing up houses in Qalqiliya.” The buses were dispatched. Geller may have been the face, but the order to expel him came from Dayan and passed to Narcissus.
The expulsion of Qalqilya was carried out quickly, and nearly half of the houses were destroyed within a few days. However, this was one of the rare cases in the history of the conflict in which Israel was forced to fold due to heavy international pressure. On June 25, it was decided to allow the residents of Qalqilya to return to their city.
The expulsion of the three Palestinian villages in the Latrun area – Imwas, Beit Nuba and Yalu – with their 8,000 inhabitants – was one of the most prominent expulsions during the war. The same was true of the destruction of the villages immediately afterwards and the establishment of Canada Park by the JNF in 1971. The villages were occupied without resistance on the second day of the war, and hours later the residents were ordered to evacuate to Ramallah. Israel claimed that many of the structures in the villages were destroyed during the fighting there. This was a false claim.
Ze’ev Bloch, a fighter and member of Kibbutz Nachshon who lives near the three expelled villages, told Akevot Institute researchers that “no one leaves his home of his own free will. There is no argument about that. Certainly, they must have been expelled. War. There are those who are expelled, some who leave, some who survive and some who die.”
In his written memoirs, he described, “Children crying, adults and old people slowly lying on the side of the road. These sights reminded me and many of the reservists at the time of other days and not so far away, when this is exactly what Jewish families looked like in occupied Europe. It was hard to avoid the comparison and our hearts missed these scenes.”
In a document leaked here, a senior Egged official testifies that the mayor of Kfar Saba “ordered 40 buses to expel the residents of Qalqilya. He said there was a historic opportunity to get rid of as many Arabs as possible.” In practice, the order came from Dayan. After the expulsion, the Kfar Saba municipality organized organized looting. The municipality’s archives contain a list of equipment taken from schools in Qalqilya
The depletion of many cities and villages left a great deal of property and spoil. The members of Kibbutz Nachshon held meetings about the fate of the lands and property that remained abandoned. The transcripts of the conversations were printed in the kibbutz’s brochure, but in the end it was decided that it would be better not to see the light of day. According to a note written in real time by the kibbutz archivist, “It was decided not to take any property or loot from the nearby villages”.
However, the looting spread throughout the country, and there were those in the government who wondered how to put a dam on it. Justice Minister Yaakov Shimshon Shapira explained at a cabinet meeting at the end of June that “the biggest trouble” is that citizens are looting and returning to Israel, “and here they cannot be arrested and prosecuted.”
One of the most prominent looting incidents took place in Qalqiliya. Cars and trucks made their way from the empty city to private homes in Kfar Saba and the surrounding area. Some of the loot was looted in an organized manner. In the archives of the Kfar Saba Municipality you can find a long list of equipment that was taken from schools in Qalqilya and transferred for the benefit of students in schools in the Hebrew City. The person who organized the robbery was the mayor of Geller, who was also appointed governor of Qalqilya for a short time.
The expulsion and destruction along the Green Line continued after the war. This was the case, for example, in Zeita, near Tulkarm, and in Beit ‘Awa, south of Hebron. The systematic evacuation of villages along the Green Line supports the fact that these were not local initiatives. General Narkis himself repeatedly boasted publicly that he played a central role in the expulsion of the population. Even before the war, he informed his subordinates that if Jordan joined the battles, “we would sweep all the Arabs out of the West Bank.” He promised and kept it, at least partially. After the war, he admitted that some of the deportations he initiated were in revenge. Although Chief of Staff Rabin ordered him to stop the deportation and even threatened a legal investigation, Narkis enjoyed the backing of Dayan, who pushed to establish facts on the ground.
In December 1967, six months after the war, the Foreign Ministry’s legal advisor, Theodore Miron, sent a letter to the ministry’s director general regarding “the expulsion of Arabs to the east of the Jordan.” This dramatic letter, which is being published here for the first time, is proof that government ministers were involved in the expulsion. Dayan was not a galloping and rebellious horse in this matter.
“The divorce constitutes a serious violation of the Geneva Convention,” Miron wrote, “and especially in light of the extensive publicity that could cause complications.” He added that Military Advocate General Meir Shamgar also agrees that “the divorce violates the Convention.” One sentence he wrote summed up the history of the conflict in a succinct way: “The Ministerial Committee for Security Affairs decided to approve the policy anyway.”
This dismal historical chapter did not remain completely in the dark. As the years passed, the facts began to become clearer sparingly and gradually in historical research, investigative journalism, and documentaries. In 2005, Tom Segev’s comprehensive book “1967 — and the Land Changed Its Face” revealed a glimpse of the expulsions carried out during the war. In 2012, historian Avi Raz’s rich study, “The Bride and the Dowry,” was published in English, which included a fascinating chapter on the permission given – in crooked ways – to the rank of the operation to expel residents and destroy villages. Last year, historian Omri Sheffer Raviv published his enlightening book, “The Owners of the House: The Government of Israel and the Palestinians, 1967.1969”, Shaw described Israel’s policy of reducing the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip after the war.
And there were also those who illuminated the great expulsion in the Golan. In 2010, an investigation by Shai Vogelman in the Haaretz supplement extensively covered the operation to empty the Golan Heights of its Syrian residents. Now, documents obtained by the Haaretz supplement and the Akevot Institute make it possible to shed light on unknown aspects of the operation.
First, the occupation took place. After three days of heavy shelling, the IDF gained full control of the Syrian plateau. An orderly record of the number of residents remaining in the Golan Heights was not made until mid-August, when it became clear that the number of those who remained was just over 6,000 — out of some 130,000 Syrian civilians who lived in the Golan Heights until the war. Immediately after the occupation, a curfew was imposed on some of the remaining residents, and villagers who had been hiding in the area during the fighting were forcibly prevented from returning. A document kept at the Yitzhak Rabin Center brings the testimony of Elad Peled, the commander of the Gaash Brigade that led the occupation. According to Peled, a few days after the end of the war, a decision was made to come “with bulldozers to destroy the villages, so that there would be nowhere to return.” This is indeed what was done.
In mid-June, the commander of Israeli forces in the occupied city of Quneitra asked a representative of the MAG Corps whether he was authorized to “forcibly remove residents who have arrived in the city, and whether it is possible to transfer residents by bus to Syrian territory.” The Northern Command report said that on June 11, “the administration began to deal with the population that remained in the occupation zone, with an emphasis on the Druze and Circassian minorities.” The rest of the trial was censored. The report went on to say that “the concentration of the residents who remained in Quneitra has begun, and severe measures have been taken regarding looting.” It is not written beyond that, and as a rule, the IDF Archive does not open documents about the deportations for review.
About a month after the end of the war, the Israeli liaison officer at the UN contacted the Northern Command following a long list of detailed accusations made by Syria against Israel, and asked for his response. “Intimidation of the residents of the villages has taken on such proportions that most of the population has left their homes and fled,” the report submitted to the UN said. According to the report, the intimidation and threats manifested themselves in a variety of forms: shooting intended to cause the flee; “General shooting, neglect of the dead and expulsion of the rest of the population”; and “starving the remaining residents by burning wheat fields.” In one case, the residents were divided into two groups – the young people under the age of 25 were captured and taken to Israel, and the rest were deported to the south Syria with their hands tied behind their backs.
Amnon Assaf, a member of Kibbutz Maayan Baruch, said in Fogelman’s investigation that he witnessed the gathering of hundreds of Syrian civilians, and that the Israeli soldiers told him that they were going to expel them. “I’m not a soft-hearted person, but already at that moment I felt that something was wrong here,” Assaf said. “I remember to this day that even then this play made a bad impression on me. It’s like it was in Lod, Ramle and other places during the War of Independence.”
“They explained to us that if we pass by refugees returning from Jordan to the West Bank, we have to shoot them,” one soldier testified. “I asked the officer: And if I hear babies crying, should I shoot too? The answer was: Don’t be a girl.” Another soldier gave a similar testimony: “We were ordered to shoot in order to kill, including women and children. In the morning we would go out for searches and kill the wounded.”
In parallel with the expulsion operations, the Israeli forces were busy taking the loot that was left behind. “Robbery and looting continue unabated,” the Syrian complaint to the UN said. Every shop in Quneitra was robbed. Most of the houses were robbed, and even furniture that the invaders liked was not left behind and transported to occupied Palestine by truck.”
There is no shortage of soldiers’ testimonies that support the Syrian complaint. “You go in to clean the house, and your eyes are naturally attracted to the rest of the details,” said one soldier in a testimony that was hidden from a fighter’s discourse. “Sometimes the guys would shoot the TVs out of desperation.” Despair of what? “If I don’t take it, then someone else will take it, and those will be from the Military Police, so it’s better to demolish it.”
Additional documents underlying this investigation were located by us at the Red Cross Archives in Geneva. Israel tried to restrict the organization’s steps, but did not succeed in removing it completely. An observer who visited the Golan Heights in mid-July wrote: “We saw the usual picture of destruction and total looting: bedding burned, all the inventory scattered in chaos, the roofs destroyed, the skeletons of furniture blackened with fire.”
In their reports, the Red Cross also referred to the grain fires that Syria said were intended to starve the remaining residents. In general, it is clear that the observers understood what they were seeing. One of them wrote that the IDF representative “wants us to believe that these people went to look for their families in Syria in order to bring them back. We told him that he was a fictional narrator. The sergeant smiled and agreed.”
In contrast to the expulsion in 1948, this time the Arab expulsion was extensively covered in the international media. Occasionally Israeli reports also appeared. Five months after the war, activist and journalist Yosef Algazi published an article that was handled by the censors. According to Algazi, who published the article with the signs of erasure, hundreds of thousands of people had been expelled from the Golan, the West Bank and Gaza since the beginning of the war: “Indeed, some of them were uprooted from ‘will.’ That is, out of fear of gunfire, shelling and other dangers, but the rest were literally uprooted from the fear of the Uzi reed and the explosives load.”
Colonel Shlomo Gazit, who is in charge of the Military Government in the occupied territories on behalf of the General Staff, claimed in March 1968 that “under no circumstances should we call the voluntary migration of Syrians to Syrian territory expulsion.” In internal correspondence, Israeli officials used the word “expulsion” without difficulty. Michael Koomei, the political advisor to Foreign Minister Abba Eban, wrote in an internal correspondence from mid-1968 that “the expulsion of the Arabs of Quneitra, which has been going on for several months, confronts us with claims and clarifications with the Red Cross every time.” He suggested a better course of action: “It seems to us that if there is no escape, it is better to eliminate the problem at once in the most humane way.”
In her film “Shooting,” director Natalie Braun brings the testimony of a resident of the abandoned village of Mansura, which was located near where Kibbutz Merom Golan is located today: “Most of the people in the village were scared and fled towards Damascus. Only about a quarter of the village’s residents remained. Grandma was already old and had a problem with her leg so we stayed. We thought that the Jews would leave the Golan Heights soon. Many of the men who left managed to infiltrate and return to their homes and collect the animals that had been scattered, but it was dangerous because the Israeli military shot anyone who tried to return. Those who fled took everything, we saw them loading things onto tractors. I’m ashamed to tell you that we saw and didn’t do anything out of fear. And I remember the thoughts that crossed my mind: What would be left of everything I knew? Where will my house be?”A
Israel did not allow anyone to return and declared martial law. Within a few months, Jewish settlers began to build their homes in the newly occupied territory.
Adam Raz is a researcher at the Akevot Institute for the Study of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.