Predictive History

Operation Hiram and Completing the Job

6 min read

Operation Hiram and Completing the Job

Core idea: The final phase of the ethnic cleansing (October 1948 - January 1949) completed what Plan Dalet had begun, as Operation Hiram swept the upper Galilee and southern Lebanon in two weeks of intensive artillery and air attacks, accompanied by some of the worst massacres of the entire Nakba at Dawaymeh, Safsaf, and Sa’sa, while “mopping-up” operations continued into spring 1949 to erase the last Palestinian presence from areas Israel intended to keep.

Operation Hiram

Named after the biblical king of Tyre, Operation Hiram was launched in mid-October 1948 with an ambitious and expansionist goal: Israel’s takeover of the upper Galilee and southern Lebanon. With intensive artillery and air force attacks, Jewish troops captured both in a matter of two weeks.

The Israeli air force dropped about 10,000 leaflets calling upon villagers to surrender, although not promising any immunity from expulsion. None of the villages did, and almost as a whole, came out to confront the Israeli forces. For a brief period, Palestinian villages turned themselves into strongholds, standing up to the besieging Israeli troops with whatever meagre arms they had. A mixture of local youth and the remnants of the ALA were entrenched for a week or two before being overpowered. Four hundred ALA volunteers lost their lives in those days, quite often disobeying orders from their headquarters to leave.

Most of the villages in the upper Galilee were seized in a single day at the end of October: Deir Hanna, Ilabun, Arraba, Iqrit, Farradiyya, Mi’ilya, Khirbat Irribin, Kfar Inan, Tarbikha, Tarshiha, Mayrun, Safsaf, Sa’sa, Jish, Fassuta, and Qaddita. The list included another ten villages.

The Dawaymeh Massacre

The events that unfolded in Dawaymeh, between Beersheba and Hebron, are described by Pappe as probably the worst in the annals of Nakba atrocities. The village was occupied by Battalion 89 of Brigade Eight on October 28, 1948. The original population was 2,000, but an additional 4,000 refugees had tripled that number.

The soldiers entered from three flanks, leaving open the eastern flank with the aim of driving out 6,000 people in one hour. When this failed, the troops jumped out of their vehicles and started shooting indiscriminately, many of whom ran to the mosque or fled to a nearby holy cave. The mukhtar later counted 455 people missing, among them around 170 children and women. Jewish soldiers who took part reported babies whose skulls were cracked open, women raped or burned alive in houses, and men stabbed to death.

The commander of Battalion 89 had received orders from Chief of Staff Yigael Yadin: “Your preparations should include psychological warfare and ‘treatment’ (tipul) of citizens as an integral part of the operation.” The UN’s Palestine Conciliation Commission convened a special session to investigate the massacre.

The Safsaf Massacre

When a mixed unit of Jewish and Druze soldiers entered the village of Safsaf on October 29, 1948, the familiar procedure for identifying “suspects” took place. Seventy of the men were taken out, blindfolded and then moved to a remote spot and summarily shot. Israeli archival documents confirm this case. The rest of the villagers were ordered to leave. Survivors recall how four women and a girl were raped in front of the other villagers and how one pregnant woman was bayoneted.

The Iqrit and Kfar Bir’im Betrayal

Among the most emblematic stories of the “mopping-up” phase was that of the Maronite Christian village of Iqrit. An Israeli battalion occupied it on October 31, 1948. The people surrendered without a fight, expecting to be welcome in the new Jewish state. The commander promised them they would be able to return in two weeks. On November 6, they were evicted and transported by army trucks to Rama.

Almost a year and a half later, the people of Iqrit took their case to the Israeli Supreme Court, which on July 31, 1951 declared the eviction illegal and ordered the army to allow them to resettle. To bypass the ruling, the IDF fabricated a formal expulsion order backdated to November 6, 1948. On Christmas Eve 1951, the Israeli army demolished all the houses in Iqrit, sparing only the church and the cemetery. Similar destruction was carried out on Kfar Bir’im and Ghabisiyya. Almost sixty years later, the struggle to return has still not ended.

Mopping-Up Operations

In November and December 1948, cleansing activity continued in the form of “second-thought” operations targeting villages that had not originally been on the list but were added because Israel’s political elite wanted to eradicate the unmistakably “Arabic” character of the Galilee. In 1976, the highest official in the Ministry of Interior, Israel Koening, called the Palestinians in the Galilee a “cancer in the state’s body” and the Israeli Chief of Staff, Raphael Eitan, openly spoke of them as “cockroaches.”

The Southern Front

The last front was the southern Negev, which the Israelis reached in November 1948. The two southern coastal towns of Isdud and Majdal were taken and their populations expelled to the Gaza Strip. Several thousands who remained in Majdal were expelled in December 1949, shocking some left-wing Israelis as this was done during a “time of peace.” December 1948 was devoted to cleansing the Negev of its Bedouin tribes. When they had finished, ninety per cent of the people who had lived for centuries in the most southern inhabited region of Palestine were gone.

A Mini Empire in the Making

So successful was Israel during this final phase that dreams of a mini-empire re-emerged. Ben-Gurion took the discussion to a committee of five veterans of the Consultancy, who met at the army’s new headquarters. On May 24, 1948, after meeting with his advisers, Ben-Gurion’s diary entry revealed: “We will establish a Christian state in Lebanon, the southern border of which will be the Litani River. We will break Transjordan, bomb Amman and destroy its army, and then Syria falls, and if Egypt will still continue to fight — we will bombard Port Said, Alexandria and Cairo.”

Plans to seize southern Lebanon resulted in thirteen villages being captured, mass executions at Hula (eighty villagers) and Saliha (more than 100 people), and Israeli forces occupying the area until April 1949.

Key Insight

Operation Hiram and the final phase of cleansing reveal that as victory became certain, the atrocities grew worse rather than better — Dawaymeh, Safsaf, and the southern Lebanon massacres were committed when Israel faced no existential threat whatsoever, proving that the violence was not defensive desperation but the calculated completion of a demographic engineering project.

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