'Ayn Ghazal

The New York Times quoted a Jewish newspaper as saying that there was an attack on the village on 14 March 1948, in which four houses were razed to the ground. The British police stated that one Arab woman was killed and five men were wounded in the attack. The Palestinian newspaper Filastin had reported an attack on Ayn Ghazal a few days earlier, on 10 March, without giving further details. Two months later, on 20 May, another attack took place. An informant told a reporter for the Associated Press that Ayn Ghazal was stormed by the Haganah after snipers halted traffic on the Haifa-Tel Aviv road. No mention was made of casualties.

Ayn Ghazal, Jaba', and Ijzim constituted the Little Triangle south of Haifa, which resisted a number of Israeli attacks in subsequent months and formed a pocket that was not occupied until the end of July 1948. Three main attempts were made to capture the villages. The first two attempts, on 18 June and 8 July, were successfully repulsed by the villages' defenders. In the third, the Israeli army took advantage of the second truce to strike with a special force drawn from units of the Golani, Carmeli, and Alexandroni brigades. The operation began on 24 July and involved massive artillery and aerial bombardment for a whole day. (Later, Israeli foreign minister Shertok lied to a United Nations mediator and said that 'no planes were used.') On 26 July, an Associated Press story noted simply that Israeli planes and infantry had violated the Palestinian truce by attacking the three villages.

Despite the severity of the onslaught, the villages still took two days to occupy, and Israeli troops continued to fire on villagers as they fled. Israeli historian Benny Morris states that captured villagers were ordered to bury the charred bodies of from 25 to 30 people at Ayn Ghazal, and some reports indicated that there had been a massacre in the village. But the Israeli authorities denied this, saying that the bodies were burned because they had been found dead and had begun to decompose. The New York Times reported at the time that Israeli liaison officers admitted to the UN truce supervisors that nine villagers had been killed at Ayn Ghazal. The United Nations could find no evidence of a massacre. However, in mid-September UN investigators put the number of killed or missing from the three villages at 130, according to the Times. UN mediator Count Folke Bernadotte condemned Israel's 'systematic' destruction of Ayn Ghazal and Jaba' and asked that the Israeli government restore at its own expense all houses damaged or destroyed during and after the attack. Bernadotte said that 8,000 people had been driven out of the three villages and demanded that they be allowed to return. Israel rejected Bernadotte's demand.