Quotations: During the War of 1948

"In the Negev we will not buy land. We will conquer it." (Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem)

~ David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father and first prime minister

"These operations can be carried out in the following manner: either by destroying villages (by setting fire to them, by blowing them up, and by planting mines in their rubble), and especially those population centers that are difficult to control permanently; or by mounting combing and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the villages, conducting a search inside them. In case of resistance, the armed forces must be wiped out and the population expelled outside the borders of the state."

~From Operation Dalet, adopted by the Zionist leadership in 1948

"[Capturing the village] without a fight, [Zionist forces first] killed about 80-100 [male] Arabs, women and children. The children they killed by breaking their heads with sticks. There was not a house without dead…. One soldier boasted that he had raped a woman and then shot her. One woman, with a newborn baby in her arms, was employed to clear the courtyard where the soldiers ate. She worked a day or two. In the end they shot her and her baby." (Frinkelstein, Image)

~Eyewitness soldier of the massacre at Ad-Dawayima village in October 1948