Expulsion of Arabs in Beersheba

On Thursday 21st October 1948 Israeli forces attacked and captured Beersheba a city in the Negev desert fifty miles from Jerusalem.

The Jewish World reported that the Israeli army attacked Beersheba after “several days of bombing form the air” which had “caused the flight of most of Beersheba’s 3,000 inhabitants”. It added that “a large booty fell into the hands of the captors”.

The Civil & Military Gazette quotes  a correspondent from The Times as saying that in Beersheba the Israeli army is “systematically looting houses which survived bombing” 

“It is difficult” he continues “to excuse the behaviour of those who ridicule Islamic devotions in a desecrated mosque…..holy books have been strewn upon the floor, and the and the Israel soldiery attempt to amuse the female elements by imitating an Imam’s call to prayer”

The Gazette also says that “in spite of the difficulties under which they worked, it is pointed out, the Arab care-takers to the last tended the graves of the British and Australian soldiers who died in Beersheba in 1917”

The Gazette also reports that in the Negev “20,000 Arab inhabitants have fled before the advance of the Jewish troops”, the Israeli army was carrying out “wanton destruction of Arab Homes” 

and that “only the noise of army traffic disturbs  the death-like silence of the evacuated villages. Houses have been looted and many of them have been burned.”

In the video below Hava Keller, a member of the Zionist paramilitary group Haganah, talks about the expulsion of Arabs in Beersheba after its capture by the Israelis and how the Arabs were driven in busses to Gaza.

Following the 1948 war Hava Keller got married and and was a founder Kibbutz Saar in northern Israel. She would ask when the Palestinian residents of a nearby village would be allowed to return to their homes, The Jerusalem Post says that “When she saw the village was destroyed, she said, she decided to change her views concerning Zionism.”

"That day was the day I was done with Zionism," Keller said. "I realized that Israel had no intention of living in peace with the Palestinians, and that the [real] intention was to force them out."