Ma'alot massacre

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The Ma'alot massacre was an attack, carried out in Ma'alot, Israel by members of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, that occurred on May 15, 1974, the 26th anniversary of Israeli independence. In this massacre members of the DFLP murdered 22 religious high school students from the city of Safed.

Ma'alot, located on a plateau in the hills of the Western Galilee region of Israel, some six miles south of the Lebanese border,[1] was a development town founded in 1957 by Jewish refugees, mainly from Morocco and other Arab countries such as Tunisia. The terrorist attack was perpetrated by three members of the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PDFLP), al-Jabha al-Dimuqratiyya li-Tahrir Filastin. The commander of the group was Achmed Lini. The names of the other two were Achmed Haribi and Ziad Rachim.

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[edit] The attack

The terrorists infiltrated into Israel through the Nachal Matat nature reserve from south of the Lebanese village of Ramish. The group entered Israel near Moshav Zarit on Sunday night May 13th. They were heavily armed with AK-47 assault rifles, hand grenades, and plastic explosives of Czechoslovakian manufacture. They rested for a day and night on Monday 13th. in orchards near the Druse village of Hurfiesh. A border patrol unit discovered their footprints but could not follow the trail, and mistakenly reported to superiors that the footprints belonged to smugglers. Due to this intepretative error no alarm or alert was given.

Proceeding to Ma'alot up the winding road, at a stone bridge they unexpectedly encountered a van driven by a Druse resident of Hurfiesh, bringing Christian Arab women from the village of Fassuta home from work at the Ata textile works in the Haifa Bay area. The terrorists' commander, Lini, stood on the road way and opened fire on the vehicle, killing a woman and wounding both the driver and other workers. The driver, on seeing the terrorist, quickly reversed gears, turned off the headlights and drove backwards up the hill towards Moshav Zuriel. His quick reactions saved the lives of four other passengers.

Emboldened by their success and the lack of an immediate Israeli military or police response, the terrorists continued on their mission. They walked through the fields and chicken runs near Moshav Zuriel downward from the crest of the dark wadi-valley towards the town of Ma'alot that lay across the wadi. Approaching the building, they decided to take hostages. Lini told Haribi[citation needed] to guard the entrance of the stairwell as he and Rachim slowly climbed the steps to the second floor. They began knocking on the doors of the third floor apartments first. Frustrated by the lack of response, they shot out the lock of one of the apartments and found it empty. On the second floor, two parents, Fortuna and Yoseph, heard the noise and opened their door. The terrorists spotted them, and, guns blazing, rushed into the apartment and shot the mother, the father and their five year old son Moshe dead. Their deaf-dumb baby girl was shot and severely wounded in the abdomen but survived. The sounds of the gunfire in the middle of the night were muffled. Neighbours who had heard the gunfire lacked telephones, which were scarce in the area, to notify their fellow citizens.

After fleeing the scene, the terrorists ran towards their objective, Netiv Meir Elementary School where many students on a Gadna (an organization providing premilitary training in Israeli schools) sponsored field trip were lodged. On their way they encountered Yakov Kadosh, a sanitation worker on his rounds. Talking with him in Hebrew they asked for directions to the school. Once Kadosh realized who they really were they beat and shot him, leaving him for dead.

Netiv Meir Elementary school was a three story concrete building, constructed three years earlier, with apartment buildings under construction nearby. At that time there was no ground floor, but only an entrance to an open area of pillars. The school windows faced north and south. When the terrorists entered they took 102 students hostage. Some students managed to escape by jumping out of windows, but 85 students and some teachers were held as hostages. The children ran inside waking the others and the teachers. The latter fled, regardless of their duties to the children in their charge. The driver of the tour truck Micha Gantz later related how he urged the boys sleeping nearby to flee. Gantz managed to stay long enough to pass a few students out of the window before fleeing himself.

The teacher in charge of the tour group was one of the first to leap out of the window, apparently to notify the authorities and to grab his weapon from the truck. The terrorists then quickly began to gather the remaining 85 children, the two female first-aid medics and a teacher who had not managed to flee into a second floor end of the hallway classroom. There they kicked and hit the children and forced them under gun point and shots to sit on the floor. The terrorist then placed explosive charges and fuse lines between them at the front of the classroom. The two terrorists Achmed Haribi and Ziad Rachim stayed with the students, while the commander Achmed Lini went to the second floor landing where he could observe the access to the front of the building.

From their seizure of the building at 4 a.m. until 7:45, confusion and problems in communications were such that no reaction to the terrorists took place. The hostage-takers presented their demands the next morning, for the release from Israeli prisons of 23 Arab and three other convicted terrorists, including Kozo Okamoto - a Japanese national involved in the 1972 Lod Airport Massacre. Unless these conditions were met, they declared that they would kill the students. The deadline for meeting the conditions was set for 6:00 p.m. the same day.

At about 10:00 a young man named Sylvian Zerach wished to take photographs and to observe the activities from near the concrete 50 meter high water tower that symbolizes Ma’alot. The tower is some 200 yards from the third floor window where the third terrorist was watching. As Zerach stood near the base of the tower, the terrorist fired a burst of gunfire at him and one round severed his carotid artery. Frantic medical intervention failed to save his life.

The terrorists demanded negotiations for a prisoner exchange. General Mordechai Gur was in favour of following up the negotiations, but was overruled by Moshe Dayan.[2] The Knesset met in an emergency session, and by 3:00 p.m. a decision was reached to negotiate, but the DFLP members refused a request for more time. The Israeli government then made the decision to hold fast to its policy of non-recognition of terrorist organizations and refused to negotiate with the PDFLP.[3]

[edit] The Break-in

At 17:25, the commander of the elite Sayeret Matkal Special Forces group was given the ‘green light’ from Defense Minister Moshe Dayan to storm the building. The assault force was divided into three units; two to break in from the entrance while a third was to climb a ladder and enter from a window facing north. The squads moved into position from the blind side to the east, from the frames of some apartment buildings under construction The operation was to have been coordinated with simultaneous sniper fire on the three terrorists. At exactly 17:32 the first squad entered the building through the main entrance on the first floor, which was not locked, but simply blocked with tables and chairs. Precisely when the command to shoot was given, a chair placed on a desk blocking the front entrance fell to the floor, scaring the terrorists, and, as a result, the snipers missed their targets.

The first three man team led by Yuval Galili from Kibbutz Gevah was hit by gunfire as they tried to go up the u-shaped stairwell to the second floor. Trying to save his team members, Galili threw a phosphorus grenade into the second floor hallway to create a smokescreen and cover the retreat of his men. The smoke from the explosion blinded the second team led by Amiran Levine, which had been trained to take out Lini, at that time posted at the third floor window where he had shot the volley that had killed Zerach. When they broke in, after Galili’s team had been ‘knocked’ out, they rushed the classroom where the children were being held. Achmed Haribi, who had stayed with the children the entire time, could not speak Hebrew so the students spoke to him in Arabic. When the Israeli force broke in Haribi grabbed a student, Gabi Amsalem, and held him by gunpoint next to him on the floor. As the two other terrorists retreated towards the room, Ziad Rachim was shot dead as he neared at the threshold by Levine’s number 2. Lini however managed to reach the classroom, where he grabbed ammunition clips from the teacher’s desk, and reloaded his weapon. He then sprayed the terrified students packed in front of him. From time to time, he grabbed a grenade and tossed it out the window. He was shot several times by the incursors, but managed to hold position while firing into the children. Only when a burst of fire broke his left wrist did he pick up two grenades and throw them into the group of young girls huddled together on the floor three feet in front of him.

As Lini fired into the crowded ranks of students, several children managed to leap from the windows to the ground some ten feet below. As one of the survivors, Shlomo Aburamd, later recounted, the team that was to have scaled the ladder failed to do so because gunfire shattered the glass windows above them, and Lini kept throwing grenades out of the window. Once Lini was killed, the members of the team entered the room and discovered Haribi behind Amsalem and neutralized him. The rescuers had managed to kill all the hostage takers, but at the terrible cost of twenty-two dead schoolchildren and more that fifty wounded. The school children were buried in their hometown Safed while the Cohen family were buried in Ma'alot. The trauma of the cost of the operation can be still felt in Safed and in Ma’alot even today.

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[edit] Aftermath

The names of the 21 students who were killed during the assault: Ilana Turgeman, Rachel Aputa, Yocheved Mazoz, Sarah Ben-Shim'on, Yona Sabag, Yafa Cohen, Shoshana Cohen, Michal Sitrok, Malka Amrosy, Aviva Saada, Yocheved Diyi, Yaakov Levi, Yaakov Kabla, Rina Cohen, Ilana Ne'eman, Sarah Madar, Tamar Dahan, Sarah Sofer, Lili Morad, David Madar, Yehudit Madar. Funerals were held soon after, with some of the 10,000 mourners chanting "Death to the terrorists!" [2]

The next day Israel bombed seven Palestinian refugee camps and villages in southern Lebanon killing 27 and wounding 138. [4] The traumatic effect of the event on the Israeli public was a major contributor to the establishment of the Civil Guard volunteer police unit, on July 10, 1974, and the Yamam.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Iain Mayhew, ‘Israel’s Front Line Children,’ Mirror10 August 2006,
  2. ^ Noam Chomsky, Pirates and Emperors, Old and New: International Terrorism in the Real World, South End Press, Cambridge Mass. rev.edition 2002 p.65, citing Uri Milstein, Monitin, August 1984
  3. ^ Stohl, Michael. 1983. "Demystifying Terrorism: The Myths and Realities of Contemporary Political Terrorism," in M. Stohl (ed.) The Politics of Terrorism, 2nd edition. Marcel Dekker, p. 10.
  4. ^ 1974: Dozens die as Israel retaliates for Ma'alot

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