Ein al-Zeitun Massacre (May 1948)

The Ein al-Zeitun Massacre, May 1948: The Village That Fell Before Safed

In the hills of the Upper Galilee, just north of the city of Safad, there once stood a village whose very name was a small poem: Ein al-Zeitun, the spring of the olives. Its people drew water from an ancient spring, tended their vineyards and olive groves, and lived in stone houses on a hillside their families had farmed for centuries. In the first days of May 1948, that village was shelled before dawn, its men marched into a gully and shot with their hands bound, and its homes blown apart so that the people of Safad could watch from the hills and learn to be afraid.

What makes Ein al-Zeitun so difficult to dismiss is that much of what we know comes from the Israeli soldiers who were there. They wrote it down. They testified. This page tells the village’s story with the empathy its people deserve, and with the weight of a record confirmed by Palestinian survivors and Israeli participants alike.

A Spring of Olives in the Galilee

Ein al-Zeitun sat on the western slope of a wadi about a mile and a half north of Safad, so close to the city that it was considered one of its suburbs. Its roots ran deep. Medieval Arab geographers wrote of the spring there; tax records from the 1500s already counted its families. By 1945 it was home to around 820 people, all of them Muslim, who cultivated olives, grain, and grapes on land watered by rainfall and a spring that lay just to the north. The village had an elementary school and a mosque. It was, in every sense, an ordinary and rooted community — the kind of place the Nakba would erase by the hundreds. That wider pattern is traced in our timeline of Palestinian history.

A Massacre by Design

The attack on Ein al-Zeitun was not random. It was part of Operation Yiftach, the Palmach offensive commanded by Yigal Allon to seize the eastern Galilee and the city of Safad before the British Mandate ended on May 14. Historians describe the operation as part of Plan Dalet, the broader Zionist plan to secure and clear territory. Striking a village on the edge of an Arab town, to break the town’s morale before the main assault, was a deliberate tactic — the same method used against Tiberias weeks earlier. The Israeli historian Ilan Pappe documents this as a conscious policy: massacre the village beside the city, and the city empties itself in fear.

There was a darker undercurrent, too. Local Jewish fighters believed that men from Ein al-Zeitun had taken part in the killing of Jews in Safad during the violence of 1929, and revenge appears to have shaped what followed. The battalion that carried out the attack was led by Moshe Kelman — the same commander responsible for the raid on the village of Sa’sa’ — a name that recurs through the bloodiest chapters of the Galilee’s 1948.

Dawn on May 1, 1948

The villagers later recalled that the terror began at three in the morning, with a barrage from eleven mortars, followed by a ground assault. Among the shells was one of the first Davidka mortars — a crude, wildly inaccurate homemade weapon that was nearly useless for hitting targets but produced an enormous, terrifying noise. So frightening was the sound that some Arabs reportedly believed the explosions were atomic bombs. Fear, not accuracy, was the point.

The few village men who had weapons made a tactical retreat, but most of the villagers chose to stay in their homes, hoping that staying put would keep their families safe. When the troops entered, the people were rounded up. The men were separated and taken away; the rest were humiliated and driven out as shots were fired over their heads. Thirty-seven men were selected, seemingly at random, and held as captives. What happened to them next is among the coldest episodes of the entire Nakba.

The Gully: The Execution of the Prisoners

According to the Israeli historian Benny Morris, the thirty-seven captives were probably among a group of around seventy people taken to a deep gully between Ein al-Zeitun and Safad and murdered there on the orders of Moshe Kelman. The Israeli writer Netiva Ben-Yehuda, herself a Palmach fighter present at the time, described the prisoners being bound and left tied in the gully for two days. Kelman, she recounted, struggled to find soldiers willing to carry out the killing; most of his men refused. In the end, he found two who would do it.

Then came the part that reveals everything. Knowing the Red Cross might come to investigate, the men ordered the corpses’ hands untied, to hide the fact that the prisoners had been killed in cold blood while bound. Soldiers, including Ben-Yehuda, were detailed to loosen the ropes and bury the bodies before any outside investigator could arrive. The cover-up is itself the confession.

The Human Toll

The figures below are drawn from Palestinian oral histories, Israeli archival sources, and the foundational scholarship on Palestine’s destroyed villages. Where estimates differ, the documented range is shown. The dead were not only the bound men in the gully — an Israeli soldier sent to divert the village spring later described finding the bodies of women, children, and babies near the village mosque.

Witnesses From Within

The historical importance of Ein al-Zeitun lies partly in who its witnesses were. This is not a massacre known only through the testimony of its victims. Netiva Ben-Yehuda, a Palmach commander and later a respected Israeli author, recorded the killing of the bound prisoners in her writing. The soldier Hans Lebrecht described the bodies near the mosque. The officer Elad Peled recalled his own men, drunk on victory, going berserk as they dynamited the houses. Another soldier’s account, preserved by an Israeli historian, told of captives stripped of their watches and wallets before being led to a hill and shot.

When the perpetrators themselves become the witnesses, denial becomes very hard to sustain. The record of Ein al-Zeitun is, in this sense, unusually secure — and unusually damning.

The Fall of Safad and the Emptying of the Galilee

The destruction of Ein al-Zeitun did exactly what it was meant to do. Over the following two days, Palmach sappers burned and blew up the village in full view of Safad, whose residents watched from nearby hills. Word of the killings spread, and terror gripped the city’s Arab population. Within days, Safad — home to roughly ten to twelve thousand Palestinians — fell, and its people fled. The pattern would repeat across the Galilee, village after village, town after town.

What Stands There Today

Today, much of where Ein al-Zeitun stood lies beneath the trees of an Israeli forest, part of the Birya woodland planted by the Jewish National Fund over a cluster of erased Galilee villages. Forests like these, marketed as nature reserves, grow over the rubble of Palestinian homes — a green silence laid across the memory of what was destroyed. A few traces survive: an arched stone entrance, the old well, the spring that gave the village its name. The remains of the village mosque were converted into a milk farm, its founding-date stone removed and its walls covered with graffiti.

Yet erasure is never complete. Ein al-Zeitun lives on in the memories carried by its refugees and in Palestinian art — its oral histories gave the celebrated novelist Elias Khoury material for his landmark book Gate of the Sun. That same insistence on remembering survives in the symbols Palestinians hold close, from the keffiyeh to the colors of the watermelon.

The Living Legacy of a Buried Village

The families driven from Ein al-Zeitun and the wider Safad region did not disappear; they scattered, many into Lebanon and Syria, where their descendants remain refugees to this day. As of 2026, nearly six million Palestine refugees are registered with the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the living inheritance of villages like this one. The terror of a single night in 1948 still shapes the lives of millions who have never been permitted to return.

This is why Palestinians speak of the Nakba in the present tense. The same logic of displacement that emptied the Galilee continues to define Palestinian life. To see how that thread runs into the present, our account of life in Gaza before the recent devastation offers a human window into a people still carrying this memory. For many, remembrance is also an act of faith, expressed in the dua for Palestine.

A Note on Sources and Editorial Standards

This article was written to be accurate, transparent, and humane. Its account rests on the most authoritative scholarship and documentation available, including Walid Khalidi’s All That Remains, Benny Morris’s histories of the 1948 war, Nafez Nazzal’s oral-history research The Palestinian Exodus from Galilee, Ilan Pappe’s The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, the firsthand writing of Israeli participant Netiva Ben-Yehuda, the peer-reviewed work of historian Mustafa Abbasi on the battle for Safad, the Palestinian Museum’s Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (Palquest), and the Israeli memory organization Zochrot. Where sources differ on the death toll, that range is stated openly rather than concealed. Current refugee figures are drawn from UNRWA and the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR). This page is informational; it makes no commercial request of its readers and exists solely to document and remember.

Last reviewed and updated: June 2026.

References and Citations

1. Khalidi, Walid (ed.). All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948. Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992.
2. Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (Palquest), The Palestinian Museum. ‘Ayn al-Zaytun. Available at: https://www.palquest.org/en/place/16925/ayn-al-zaytun
3. Zochrot. ‘Ayn al-Zaytun (village documentation). Available at: https://www.zochrot.org/villages/village_details/49380/en
4. Morris, Benny. The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited. Cambridge University Press, 2004.
5. Nazzal, Nafez. The Palestinian Exodus from Galilee 1948. Institute for Palestine Studies, 1978.
6. Pappe, Ilan. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oneworld, 2006.
7. Ben-Yehuda, Netiva. The Palmach Trilogy (eyewitness account), 1984.
8. Abbasi, Mustafa. “The Battle for Safad in the War of 1948: A Revised Study.” International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 36, 2004.
9. Zochrot / JNF eBook. Forests planted over depopulated villages of the Safad region. Available at: https://jnf.zochrot.org/
10. UNHCR. Figures at a Glance (Global Trends 2025, published June 2026). Available at: https://www.unhcr.org/us/about-unhcr/overview/figures-glance