The Kfar Etzion massacre refers to a massacre of Jews that took place after a two-day battle in which Jewish Kibbutz residents and Haganah militia defended Kfar Etzion from a combined force of the Arab Legion and local Arab men on May 13, 1948, the day before the Israeli Declaration of Independence. Of the 127 Haganah fighters and Jewish kibbutzniks who died during the defence of the settlement, Martin Gilbert states that fifteen were killed on surrendering.Martin Gilbert, Jerusalem - Illustrated History Atlas,, V. Mitchell 1994, page 93.
Controversy surrounds the responsibility and role of the Arab Legion in the killing of those who surrendered. The official Israeli version maintains that the kibbutz residents and Haganah soldiers were massacred by local Arabs and the Arab Legion of the Jordanian Army as they were surrendering. The Arab Legion version maintains that the Legion arrived too late to prevent the kibbutz attack by men from nearby Arab villages, which was allegedly motivated by a desire to avenge the massacre of Deir Yassin and the destruction of one of their villages several months earlier.Henry Laurens, La Question de Palestine, vol.2, Fayard 2007 p.96.:'According to the Arab Legion version, the Jordanian soldiers arrived too late to impede the massacre by villagers who were keen to avenge Deir Yassin and the losses they had sustained since November (it should be kept in mind that it was the colony that opened hostilities in December by destroying a nearby village)'. Selon la version de la Légion, les soldats jordaniens sont arrivés trop tard pour empêcher le massacre de la part des villageois désireux de venger Deir Yassin et leurs pertes depuis le mois de novembre (il faut rappeler que c'est la colonie qui a ouvert les hostilités en décembre en détruisant un village voisin).' Laurens adds:'Le plus probable est que tout se soit passé dans la plus grande confusion' (Most probably, everything took place in a situation of enormous confusion.) The surrendering Jewish residents and fighters are said to have been assembled in a courtyard, only to be suddenly fired upon; it is said that many died on the spot, while most of those who managed to flee were hunted down and killed.
Four prisoners survived the massacre and were transferred to Transjordan.Meron Benvenisti, "Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948", University of California Press, 2000 p.116 Immediately following the surrender on May 13, the kibbutz was looted and razed to the ground. The members of the three other kibbutzim of the Gush Etzion -- Massu'ot Yitzhak (established in 1945), Ein Tzurim (1946) and Revadim (1947) -- surrendered the next day and were taken as POWs to Jordan.
The bodies of the victims were left unburied until, one and a half years later, the Jordanian government allowed Shlomo Goren to collect the remains, which were then interred at Mount Herzl. The survivors of the Etzion Bloc were housed in former Arab houses in Jaffa.Gershom Gorenberg, Occupied Territories: The Untold Story of Israel's Settlements,I.B.Tauris, 2007 p. 20.
Background
Kfar Etzion was a kibbutz founded in 1943, for military and agricultural ends,Larry Collins, Dominique Lapierre, O Jerusalem,(1972) Granada Books 1982, p. 217 about 2 km west of the road between Jerusalem and Hebron. By the end of 1947, there were 163 adults and 50 children living there. Much of the town's population was made up of Holocaust survivors. Together with three nearby kibbutzim established 1945–1947, it formed Gush Etzion ('Etzion Bloc'). According to one member of the settlement, relations were good between settlers and local Arabs, with attendance at each other's weddings, until November 1947.Margalit Zisman, cited Michael Petrou, Is This Your First War?: Travels Through the Post-9/11 Islamic World, Dundurn, 2012 p. 167
The United Nations partition plan for Palestine of November 29, 1947, placed the bloc, an enclave surrounded by an Arab area, inside the boundaries of the intended Arab state,Avi Shlaim, 'Israel and the Arab Coalition in 1948,' in Albert H. Hourani, Phillip Khoury, Mary Christina Wilson (eds.)The Modern Middle East, I.B.Tauris, 2nd ed. (2005), pp. 535-56. where, moreover, Jewish settlement was to be forbidden through a transitional period.Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 370. For Hebronite Arabs, the bloc constituted an 'alien intrusion' on ground that had been wholly Arab for centuries,' though it had been built on land either purchased by Jews (1928) or acquired by them through a 1942 acquisition that bypassed Mandatory law.Larry Collins, Dominique Lapierre, O Jerusalem,(1972) Granada Books 1982 p.216. 'In 1942, by a complex legal manoeuvre, the Fund circumvented the restrictions on Jewish land purchases set out by the British government's 1939 White Paper and acquired the land of a nearby German monastery whose monks had been interned as enemy aliens by the British. On an April night one year later, three women and ten men slipped through the darkness to lay claim to the monastery and officially establish the settlement of Kfar Etzion.' According to Henry Laurens, Kfar Etzion had started hostilities in the area in December by destroying a local Arab village.Henry Laurens (scholar), La Question de Palestine, vol.2, Fayard 2007 p.96. On 10 December, a convoy from Bethlehem of four trucks en route to the Gush Etzion bloc was ambushed near Solomon's Pools and 10 of its 26 passengers and escorts were killed;Yoav Gelber,Palestine, 1948: War, Escape and the Emergence of the Palestinian Refugee Problem,Sussex University Press p.26. The Palestine Police Force had mandated that the convoy travel in pickup tracks, under the belief that armored vehicles would provoke a stronger Arab response, though the ambush of the four trucks indicated that the approach had failed.Gush Etzion 1948, Brtisish Palestine Police Association. Accessed July 9, 2026. "At first the Police ordered Haganah not to use armoured vehicles escorted by their own armed men when sending supplies to Gush Etzion as that would only increase the Arabs' fervor, so the initial convoys to Gush Etzion used open pickup trucks. The trucks were accompanied by uniformed Notrim. The convoy of 11th December was the first failure of such convoys. Its four vehicles were ambushed on the main road north of King Solomon's pools. Of the 18 people on board, ten were killed, four injured." Though on January 5, the children and some women had been evacuated with British assistance, and though David Shaltiel recommended its evacuation, the Haganah, on Yigal Yadin's counsel, decided against withdrawing from the settlements for several reasons: they commanded a strategic position on Jerusalem's southern approach from Hebron,Mark Daryl Erickson, Joseph E. Goldberg, Stephen H. Gotowicki, Bernard Reich, Sanford R. Silverburg (1996). An Historical Encyclopedia of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, p. 149. Greenwood; and were considered, in the words of Abdullah Tall, a 'sharp thorn stuck in the heart of a purely Arab area'. Several relief convoys from the Haganah in Jerusalem had been ambushed.
In the months prior to May 15, Haganah militiamen in the bloc's kibbutzim repeatedly fired on Arab civilians, and British traffic, including convoys, moving between Jerusalem and Hebron, under instruction to do so in order to draw and drain Arab forces from the fight for Jerusalem.Henry Laurens, La Question de Palestine, Fayard 2007, p. 96.Benny Morris, The Road to Jerusalem: Glubb Pasha, Palestine and the Jews, I.B.Tauris, 2003, pp. 135-37. On two occasions, April 12 and May 3, Arab Legion units were ambushed, and several legionnaires killed or wounded by the bloc militias, - Kfar Etzion soldiers being directly involved in the incident on April 12Chronology, 9 April 1948 - 22 April 1948, Chronology of International Events and Documents, Volume 4, issue 8, Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1948; p.270: '12 April. — Jews in the Kfar Etzion settlement near the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv road fired on an Arab convoy and the Arabs fought back.' - Arab irregular forces made small-scale attacks against the settlements. An emergency reinforcement convoy attempting to march to Gush Etzion under cover of darkness was discovered and its all 35 members killed by Palestinian Arab forces. Despite some emergency flights by an Auster from Jerusalem and Piper Cubs out of Tel Aviv onto an improvised airfield, adequate supplies were not getting in.
As the end of the British Mandate drew closer, the fighting in the region intensified. Although the Arab Legion was theoretically in Palestine under British command, they began to operate more and more independently. On March 27, land communication with the rest of the Yishuv was severed completely when the Nebi Daniel Convoy was ambushed on its return to Jerusalem, and 15 Haganah soldiers died before the remainder were extricated by the British. It was ambushes by the Etzion Bloc militias conducted against Arab Legion units on April 12 and May 4 that, according to a Haganah analysis, tipped the Legion's policy towards the bloc from one of isolating it to destroying it.Benny Morris,The Road to Jerusalem, p. 137. On May 4, following the last ambush of a Legion convoy, a joint force of British, Arab Legion and irregular troops launched a major punitive attack on Kfar Etzion. The Haganah abandoned a few outposts but generally resisted, and the attack failed, leaving 12 Haganah soldiers dead, 30 wounded, with a similar number of Arab legionnaires killed, and several dozen wounded. Units from the bloc may have attacked Arab traffic the following day, but the failure of the Legion's assault led Hebronites and Legion units to plan a final attack and destroy the Etzion Bloc militarily.Benny Morris,The Road to Jerusalem, pp. 137-38. The final assault on Kfar Etzion began on May 12. Parts of two Arab Legion companies, assisted by hundreds of local irregulars, had a dozen armored cars and artillery, to which the Jewish defenders had no effective answer. The commander of Kfar Etzion requested from the Central Command in Jerusalem permission to evacuate the kibbutz, but was ordered to stay. Later in the day, the Arabs captured the Russian Orthodox monastery, which the Haganah used as a perimeter fortress for the Kfar Etzion area, killing twenty-four of its thirty-two defenders.
On May 13, an attack broke through Kfar Etzion's defences and reached the settlement's centre effectively cutting off the perimeter outposts from each other.B. Morris, The Road to Jerusalem: Glubb Pasha, Palestine and the Jews. pp. 135-38, 2003.
Massacre In the Israeli mainstream version, when the hopelessness of their position became undeniable on May 13, dozens of defenders, the haverim, of Kfar Etzion laid down their arms and assembled in the courtyard, where they suddenly began to be shot at. Those not slain in the first volleys of fire pushed past the Arabs, and either escaped to hide, or gathered their weapons,Dov Knohl,Siege in the Hills:: The Battle of the Etzion Bloc, T. Yoseloff, 1958, p. 334. and were hunted down.Benny Morris, The Road to Jerusalem: Glubb Pasha, Palestine and the Jews,pp. 138-39 The number of people killed and the perpetrators, the Arab legion or local village irregulars or both, are in dispute. According to one account, the main group of about 50 defenders were surrounded by a large number of Arab irregulars, who shouted "Deir Yassin!" and ordered the Jews to sit down, stand up, and sit down again, when suddenly someone opened fire on the Jews with a machine gun and others joined in the killing. Those Jews not immediately cut down tried to run away but were pursued. According to Meron Benvenisti, hand grenades were thrown into a cellar, killing a group of 50 who were hiding there. The building was blown up.