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Israel concealing 300,000 documents about Palestinian massacres: Report

Monday, 25 February 2019 11:30 AM [ Last Update: Monday, 25 February 2019 11:43 AM ]

Israeli soldiers throw sound grenades at a group of people including journalists, near a gate leading to al-Khalil's main al-Shuhada street, closed by troops earlier in February, during an annual demonstration in memory of the 1994 Ibrahimi Mosque massacre, in the divided West Bank city of al-Khalil (Hebron), on February 22, 2019. (Photo by AFP)

Israel has been hiding 300,000 documents about its massacres of Palestinians, thousands of them dating back to the 1800s, a report says.

According to the +972 Magazine, Israel’s “State Archives” declassified secret documents last summer, but some 300,000 documents, which antedate the 1948 establishment of the regime, remained classified.

“The very existence of the 300,000 classified files—their names, dates, and origin within the state bureaucracy—had been kept a secret, until now. One-fifth of the files, deemed too sensitive still by the regime, were excluded from the disclosure,” the report by Israeli Jewish journalist Asaf Shalev said.

“There were many people who were concerned about the opening of this catalog,” Israel’s “State Archivist” Yaacov Lozowick was quoted by the website as saying in a statement accompanying the release.

Some of the files, which were kept secret, reportedly date back to 1821, while 125 of them date back to the 19th century and nearly 2,000 papers predate the Nakba (Catastrophe Day).

Files on the two most notorious Israeli massacres of Deir Yassin and Kafr Qasim are among the hidden documents, the website said.

The Kafr Qasim massacre took place on October 29, 1956 -- the first day of the Suez war -- when Israeli forces killed residents of the village who returned from their nearby agricultural lands.

Deir Yassin has long remained a symbol of Israeli violence against Palestinians due to the particularly gruesome nature of the 1948 slaughter, which targeted men, women, children, and the elderly in the tiny village.

The Deir Yassin massacre, which was carried out on April 9, 1948, was led by the Irgun militia group, whose head was future Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, with support from fellow Zionist militiamen affiliated with Haganah and Lehi groups.

According to the report, the massacre was one of the first in what would become a long line of attacks in a number of Palestinian villages, part of a broader strategy called Plan Dalet by Zionist groups to scare Palestinians in the hope that the terror would lead to an Arab exodus.

Around 750,000 Palestinians took refuge abroad in the face of the massacres — most notorious among them the one in Deir Yassin.

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