A City Emptied in a Single Day
In July 1948, the thriving Palestinian city of Lydda — a place of railways and orchards, mosques and churches, home to tens of thousands of people — was emptied almost overnight. First came the killing: men, women, and children shot in the streets and inside a mosque where they had been promised safety. Then came the march: nearly the entire population driven out at gunpoint into the searing July heat, walking toward the hills with no water and nowhere to go, while the old and the very young fell and died along the road. By the time it was over, one of the largest Arab cities in Palestine had been reduced to a few hundred frightened survivors.
This page tells the story of Lydda with the empathy its people are owed, and with a record drawn from Palestinian survivors, international observers, and the Israeli commanders who carried it out — some of whom admitted, in their own words, what they had done.
The Lydda massacre took place during Operation Dani, July 9–13, 1948. On July 12, Israeli forces killed an estimated 250 to 400 or more Palestinians in the city, including roughly 80 to 176 people sheltering in the Dahmash Mosque. The following day, under an expulsion order signed by Yitzhak Rabin and approved by David Ben-Gurion, some 60,000 to 70,000 residents of Lydda and neighboring Ramle were forced from their homes in a brutal march, during which hundreds more died of thirst and exhaustion.
The “Two Thorns”: Why Lydda?
Lydda and its neighbor Ramle were not random targets. They sat at the crossroads of Palestine’s main highways, held the country’s central railway junction and its main airport — today Ben Gurion International Airport — and lay close to Jerusalem’s water supply. To the new Israeli leadership, they were strategically irresistible. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion grew so fixated on the two towns that he called them the “two thorns” and reportedly wrote that they had to be destroyed.
In July 1948, as the first truce of the war collapsed, Israel launched Operation Dani to take them. The director of operations was Yitzhak Rabin, a future Israeli prime minister and Nobel Peace laureate. Ramle surrendered quickly. Lydda did not — and it would pay a terrible price. The wider arc of these events is traced in our timeline of Palestinian history.
The Massacre of July 12
After Israeli troops entered Lydda, they ordered the town’s men to gather in the mosques and churches and imposed a curfew. A soldier reportedly moved through the streets with a loudspeaker, promising residents they would be safe as long as they stayed inside their homes or the mosques. Hundreds believed him and took shelter.
Around midday, two or three Jordanian armored cars probed the edge of the town. Believing a rescue was coming, some residents rose up. The reaction from the occupying soldiers — isolated, frightened, and angry that a town they thought had surrendered was now resisting — was catastrophic. They were ordered to fire on anyone seen in the streets. Grenades were thrown into homes; terrified families who fled into the open were cut down. And at the Dahmash Mosque, where civilians had gathered believing no one would dare violate a house of worship, the people inside were slaughtered. A former Palmach soldier later confessed to firing an anti-tank missile into the mosque, its blast killing many at once. When the shooting stopped, bodies lay in the streets and houses, and they remained there, under the summer sun, for more than ten days. A scheduled Red Cross visit was deliberately delayed.
How Many Died — and the Honest Range
The number of Palestinians killed at Lydda is genuinely disputed, and honesty requires showing that range rather than picking a single figure. The estimates below span from the conservative count of the Israeli historian Benny Morris to the higher tallies of Palestinian historians, and they reflect different definitions — some count only the killings in the city, others include the deaths on the forced march that followed. The spread itself tells a story: this was a death toll large enough, and a chaos deep enough, that it could never be precisely counted.
Within the Dahmash Mosque alone, estimates of the dead range from about 80 to 176, with some historians placing it higher. What is not disputed across these sources — Palestinian and Israeli alike — is that unarmed men, women, and children were among those killed, and that the dead were left in the open for days while an outside investigation was held off.
The Death March to Ramallah
The killing was only the first act. On July 12 and 13, the decision was made to expel the entire population. The order for Lydda, issued through Operation Dani headquarters and signed by Yitzhak Rabin with Ben-Gurion’s agreement, was blunt: the inhabitants were to be driven out quickly, regardless of age. Soldiers gave families as little as half an hour to leave the homes their ancestors had built.
What followed has come to be known as the death march. Tens of thousands of people — the very old, the very young, the sick, the pregnant — were forced to walk east toward Ramallah through the height of the July heat, with little water and no shelter. A small military plane flew low overhead, herding them forward, never letting them rest. One survivor, a boy at the time named Raja’i Bseileh, remembered armed men with loudspeakers everywhere, and soldiers firing their rifles and seizing cash, gold, and jewelry from the fleeing families. Along the roadside, the elderly and the children began to fall — from thirst, from exhaustion, from sheer despair. The British commander John Glubb later wrote that no one would ever know how many children died on that road.
When the survivors reached Ramallah, the UN mediator Folke Bernadotte came to see them. He had witnessed the refugee camps of war-torn Europe, yet he wrote that he had never encountered scenes as terrifying as the sea of human suffering he found among the displaced of Lydda and Ramle.
A City Emptied
The scale of what was done to Lydda is hard to grasp until you see it. A bustling Palestinian city was reduced, in a matter of days, to a remnant. The chart below sets the population that was expelled against the few who were permitted to remain.
The sequence of those few days is set out below.
| Date | What Happened | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Jul 9–11, 1948 | Operation Dani begins; Ramle surrenders, Lydda is taken | Men detained in mosques and churches |
| Jul 12, 1948 | Shooting in the streets and at the Dahmash Mosque | An estimated 250–400+ killed |
| Jul 12–13, 1948 | Expulsion order signed; the forced march east begins | 60,000–70,000 driven out; hundreds die en route |
| Aug 2, 1948 | UN mediator Bernadotte visits the refugees in Ramallah | International horror at the suffering |
Admitted by Its Own Commanders
Among all the massacres of the Nakba, Lydda is one of the hardest to deny, because the people who carried it out left a record of it. Yitzhak Rabin himself wrote about the expulsion in his memoirs — a passage Israeli censors removed before publication, only for it to surface abroad. The decision and its scale were debated at the highest levels of the new state, with Ben-Gurion’s knowledge. Decades later, Israeli journalist Ari Shavit reconstructed the conquest of Lydda through extensive interviews with the commanders who were there, and former soldiers gave testimony to Israeli organizations about what happened inside the mosque.
The documentation continues to surface. A Haaretz investigation published in 2026, drawing on archival material and earlier reconstructions, revisited the conquest of Lydda as part of a broader reckoning with the deliberate killings of 1948. Nearly eight decades on, the record keeps confirming what the survivors of Lydda always said.
What Remains: Lydda Becomes Lod
Today the city is known by its Hebrew name, Lod. The Dahmash Mosque still stands. The Palestinian community that once filled the city was reduced to the small number permitted to stay, who lived for years under curfew and military control. Among those expelled was a young man named George Habash, who would become one of the most prominent figures in the Palestinian national movement; his own family was torn apart in the catastrophe. Lydda gave the Palestinian story some of its most enduring testimonies of loss, including the eyewitness account of Spiro Munayyer, who lived through the fall of his city and wrote it down so it would not be forgotten.
The erasure of a place rarely erases its memory. That memory endures in the words of survivors and in the symbols Palestinians carry, from the keffiyeh to the colors of the watermelon.
The Living Legacy of Lydda
The people marched out of Lydda did not vanish. They became refugees, many of them settling in and around Ramallah and across the West Bank, others scattered farther still. As of 2026, nearly six million Palestine refugees are registered with the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the living descendants of the Nakba that emptied cities like Lydda. The thirst of that July road still runs through the memory of millions who have never been permitted to return.
This is why Palestinians describe the Nakba in the present tense. The same logic of displacement that emptied Lydda continues to shape 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 city of tens of thousands was emptied in a matter of days, its people scattered to refugee camps and its dead left in the streets. To remember Lydda is to honor those who fell on the road to Ramallah, and to refuse the silence that the expulsion was meant to leave behind.
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 Benny Morris’s research on Operation Dani, the eyewitness testimony of Spiro Munayyer in the Journal of Palestine Studies, the work of Nur Masalha, Ilan Pappe, Michael Palumbo, and the Palestinian historian Aref al-Aref, the Palestinian Museum’s Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (Palquest), and the State of Palestine’s Negotiations Affairs Department. Where estimates of the death toll differ — and they differ widely — that full range is shown rather than concealed, with both lower and higher figures attributed to their sources. 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
- Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question (Palquest), The Palestinian Museum. Lydda, 9–13 July 1948. Available at: https://www.palquest.org/en/highlight/24073/lydda-9-13-july-1948
- Negotiations Affairs Department, State of Palestine. The Massacres of Lydd (Lod) and Ramle During the 1948 Nakba. Available at: https://www.nad.ps/en/publication-resources/faqs/massacres-lydd-lod-and-ramle-during-1948-nakba
- Morris, Benny. “Operation Dani and the Palestinian Exodus from Lydda and Ramla in 1948.” The Middle East Journal, vol. 40, no. 1, 1986.
- Munayyer, Spiro. “The Fall of Lydda” (with introduction by Walid Khalidi). Journal of Palestine Studies, vol. 27, no. 4, 1998.
- Masalha, Nur. The Palestinian Nakba: Decolonising History, Narrating the Subaltern. Zed Books, 2012.
- Pappe, Ilan. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oneworld, 2006.
- Palumbo, Michael. The Palestinian Catastrophe: The 1948 Expulsion of a People from Their Homeland. Faber & Faber, 1987.
- Al Jazeera. The Nakba: Five Palestinian Towns Massacred 75 Years Ago, 2023. Available at: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/5/15/the-nakba-five-palestinian-towns-massacred-75-years-ago
- UNHCR. Figures at a Glance (Global Trends 2025, published June 2026). Available at: https://www.unhcr.org/us/about-unhcr/overview/figures-glance
