Deir Yassin still bleeding wound

Palestinians on Saturday marked the 68th anniversary of the massacre of more than 100 Palestinian civilians by Zionist forces at the village of Deir Yassin.

"The Deir Yassin massacre serves as a necessary reminder of Israel’s ongoing policies of displacement, dispossession and dehumanization, and its willful erasure of the Palestinian narrative and human presence in historical Palestine.

Ashrawi noted that the massacre
It was one of the first in what would become a long line of Israeli military attacks on Palestinian civilians.

Deir Yassin has long been a symbol of Israeli violence for Palestinians because of the particularly gruesome nature of the slaughter, which targeted men, women, children, and the elderly in the small village west of the occupied al-Quds ('Jerusalem').

The number of victims is generally believed to be around 107, though figures given at the time reached up to 254.

The attack was part of a broader strategy called Plan Dalet by Zionist groups to scare Palestinians into flight ahead of the expected partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. It was led by the Irgun group, whose head was future prime minister Menachem Begin, with support from the Haganah and Lehi.

In order to ensure only Jews were left in the "Jewish state" -- nearly half of whose inhabitants were Palestinians -- massacres were committed by these Zionist groups in a number of villages in the hope that the ensuing terror would lead to a Palestinian exodus.

Thus the attack on Deir Yassin took place a month before Partition took place, and was part of the reasons later given by neighboring Arab states for their intervention in Palestine.

The combination of forced expulsion and flight that the massacres -- most prominent among them Deir Yassin -- precipitated left around 750,000 Palestinians as refugees abroad.

Today their descendants number more than five million, and their right to return to Palestine is a central political demand.