Captain Allen@CptAllenHistory
This Day (May 13) in 1948, Arabs Massacred Dozens of Surrendering Jews at Kfar Etzion — The Day Before Israel Declared Independence
The Jews of Kfar Etzion fought for 3 days against overwhelming odds — Haganah fighters, Palmach soldiers & civilian kibbutz families defending their homes.
Then, they raised the white flag.
On May 13, 1948, those Jews who remained surrendered to the combined force of the British-trained & British-led Jordanian Arab Legion and hundreds of local Arab villagers and armed Arab irregulars.
50 survivors were ordered to assemble in the courtyard of the kibbutz. They were photographed by an Arab in a kaffiyeh — a staged propaganda image of “surrender.”
Then an armored car belonging to the Arab Legion opened fire with its machine gun. Local Arabs immediately joined in, raking the group with submachine guns and grenades. Those who tried to run were hunted down and shot.
Dozens more who had fled into a cellar were massacred when attackers threw hand grenades inside. The Arabs then blew up the building so it collapsed on those Jews still trapped below.
Of the 127 Jewish defenders and residents killed at Kfar Etzion, dozens were massacred in cold blood after they had surrendered. Arabs then mutilated the bodies of the Jews with reports of limbs, heads, and other “trophies” taken.
This barbaric method — throwing grenades into places where Jews were hiding for their lives and taking Jewish body parts as trophies — is hauntingly familiar. Hamas terrorists did the exact same thing on October 7, 2023, at the Nova festival and in kibbutz safe rooms. The goal has never changed: slaughter as many Jews as possible in the most humiliating, medieval fashion.
At Kfar Etzion, bodies of murdered Jews were left lying where they fell — unburied and exposed — for a year and a half. Why? Because the Jordanians had ethnically cleansed every last Jew from the area and illegally annexed Judea and Samaria (which they renamed the “West Bank” for the first time in history in 1950).
Only four Jews survived the massacre at Kfar Etzion itself.
The next day, the remaining three kibbutzim in the Gush Etzion bloc surrendered under Red Cross supervision to avoid the same fate. Roughly 260–320 more Jews (including 85 women) were taken prisoner and paraded in open trucks through the streets of Amman, Jordan, to the cheers and jeers of massive crowds.
Arabs who were part of a coalition intent on preventing a Jewish state from rising in any part of the Land slaughtered dozens of Jews who had already surrendered — on the very eve of the end of the British Mandate and Israel’s declaration of independence. They then looted and razed the entire Gush Etzion bloc to the ground.
The bodies of the slaughtered Jews were finally collected by Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren in November 1949 and buried with full military honors on Mount Herzl — the first graves in Israel’s national military cemetery.
