Khan Yunis massacre


The Khan Yunis massacre took place on 3 November 1956, perpetrated by the Israel Defense Forces in the Palestinian town of Khan Yunis and the nearby refugee camp of the same name in the Gaza Strip during the Suez Crisis.
According to Benny Morris, during an IDF operation to reopen the Egyptian-blockaded Straits of Tiran, Israeli soldiers shot two hundred Palestinians in Khan Yunis and Rafah. According to Noam Chomsky's The Fateful Triangle, citing Donald Neff, 275 Palestinians were killed in a brutal house-to-house search for fedayeen.
Israeli authorities say that IDF soldiers ran into local militants and a battle erupted.

United Nations report

On 15 December 1956, the Special Report of the Director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East Covering the Period 1 November 1956 to mid-December 1956 was presented to the General Assembly of the United Nations. The report told both sides of the "Khan Yunis incident". According to the UNRWA report, "the Director has received from sources he considers trustworthy lists of names of persons allegedly killed on 3 November, numbering 275 individuals". The Director's notes also acknowledge a similar incident, the Rafah massacre, immediately following that city's occupation.

Refugee camp

Conflicting reports of skirmishes between the two peoples were also reported in the neighboring Khan Yunis Camp, which housed displaced Palestinian refugees. PLO official Abdullah Al Hourani was in the camp at the time of the killings. Al Hourani alleged that men were taken from their homes and shot by the Israeli Defense Forces. Hourani himself claimed to have fled from an attempted summary execution without injury.

Aftermath

A curfew imposed on the citizens of Gaza prevented them from retrieving the bodies of their fellow villagers, leaving them strewn about the area overnight. Injured victims of the shootings would later be transported to Gaza City by the International Red Cross for medical treatment. Israel, bowing to international pressure, withdrew from Gaza and the Sinai in March 1957. Shortly thereafter, a mass grave was unearthed in the vicinity of Khan Yunis, containing the bound bodies of forty Palestinian men who had been shot in the back of the head.
Palestinian sources list the number at 415 killed, and a further 57 who were unaccounted for, or disappeared. According to the future Hamas leader Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, an 8-year-old child in Khan Yunis at the time who witnessed one of the killings, of his uncle, 525 Gazans were killed by the IDF "in cold blood".
Israeli soldier Marek Gefen was serving in Gaza during the Suez Crisis. In 1982, Gefen, having become a journalist, published his observations of walking through the town shortly following the killings. In his account of post-occupation Khan Yunis, he said, "In a few alleyways we found bodies strewn on the ground, covered in blood, their heads shattered. No one had taken care of moving them. It was dreadful. I stopped at a corner and threw up. I couldn't get used to the sight of a human slaughterhouse."

Cultural references

In 2009, Maltese-American comics journalist Joe Sacco published a 418-page account of the killings in Khan Yunis and Rafah, entitled Footnotes in Gaza. The graphic novel relies heavily on mostly directly retrieved eyewitness accounts. Reviewing the work for The New York Times, Patrick Cockburn wrote that, " stands alone as a reporter-cartoonist because his ability to tell a story through his art is combined with investigative reporting of the highest quality" and stated that "it is difficult to imagine how any other form of journalism could make these events so interesting."
Sacco acknowledges taking sides, writing "I don't believe in objectivity as it's practiced in American journalism. I'm not anti-Israeli... It's just I very much believe in getting across the Palestinian point of view". Jose Alaniz, Adjunct Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Washington, said that Sacco uses subtle ways to manipulate the reader to make the Palestinian side seem more victimized and the Israelis more menacing.