The Ma'alot massacre[1] was a Palestinian terrorist attack that occurred on 14–15 May 1974 and involved the hostage-taking of 115 Israelis, chiefly school children, which ended in the murder of 25 hostages and six other civilians. It began when three armed members of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP)[2] infiltrated Israel from Lebanon. Soon afterwards they attacked a van, killing two Israeli Arab women while injuring a third, and entered an apartment building in the town of Ma'alot, where they killed a couple and their four-year-old son.[3] From there, they headed for the Netiv Meir Elementary School in Ma'alot, where in the early hours of 15 May 1974 they took hostage more than 115 people including 105 children. Most of the hostages were 14- to 16-years-old students[4] from a high school in Safad on a pre-military Gadna field trip spending the night in Ma'alot.
The hostage-takers soon issued demands for the release of 23 Palestinian militants and 3 others from Israeli prisons, or else they would kill the students. The Israeli side agreed, but the hostage-takers failed to get an expected coded message from Damascus. On 15 May, minutes before the 18:00 deadline set by the DFLP for killing the hostages, the Sayeret Matkal commandoes stormed the building. During the takeover, the hostage-takers killed children with grenades and automatic weapons. Ultimately, 25 hostages, including 22 children, were killed and 68 more were injured.
The DFLP terrorists infiltrated through the Nahal Mattat Nature Reserve from south of the Lebanese village of Rumaysh. The group entered Israel near MoshavZar'it on Sunday night, 13 May. They were armed with AK-47 assault rifles, grenades, and plastic explosives of Czechoslovakian manufacture. They hid until the next night in the orchards near the Druze village of Hurfeish. A border patrol unit discovered their footprints but were unable to track them down.[7]
Proceeding to Ma'alot up the winding road, the militants encountered a van driven by a Druze resident of Hurfeish bringing Arab Christian women from the village of Fassuta home from work at the ATA Textile Works in the Haifa Bay area. The leader of the militants, Linou, stood on the roadway and opened fire on the vehicle, instantly killing one woman, and wounding both the driver and other workers, one of whom later died of her wounds. The driver turned off the headlights and drove backward up the hill towards Moshav Tzuriel. Israeli soldiers were called to the scene but failed to catch them.[7]
Reaching Ma'alot, the militants knocked on the doors of several homes.[3] When they came to the home of Fortuna and Yosef Cohen, two of them who were Israeli-Arabs said in Hebrew that they were police searching for terrorists. When the door opened the militants burst in and killed the couple, their 4-year-old son Eliahu and wounded their 5-year-old daughter Miriam. Fortuna, seven months pregnant, tried to flee the intruders, but she was also shot. The only one in the family who survived unhurt was 16-month-old Yitzhak, a deaf-mute. From there, the militants headed for the Netiv Meir Elementary School where students on a school trip were lodged. On the way, they met Yaakov Kadosh, a sanitation worker, and asked for directions to the school. They then shot and injured him.[3][7]
Netiv Meir Elementary School was a three-story concrete building with apartment buildings under construction nearby. The militants entered the building at 4am, and took the 102 visiting teenage students hostage. The teenagers were spending the night in the school building as part of a three-day trip. They were students from a high school in Safad. Allegedly one of the parents of the slain teenagers had begged the headmaster to cancel the trip after learning that militants had entered the area. By then it was considered too late to cancel the trip because all the arrangements had been made. The militants had intended to lie in wait for children arriving the next day and had not expected to find so many students lodging there.[7][8] Three of four teachers escaped by jumping through the window, and abandoned their 90 pupils, which created a great deal of bitterness among the parents. The teachers were immediately suspended from their posts by local authorities.[8] 85 students and several teachers were held hostage. The students were forced to sit on the floor at gunpoint, with explosive charges between them.[citation needed]
At 10am 27-year-old Sylvan Zerach, at home on leave from the army, stood near the base of the tall concrete water tower not far from the school building to get a closer view of what was going on. One of the militants opened fire on him, hitting Zerach in the neck. Zerach later died in the hospital.[citation needed]
At an emergency session of the Knesset, a decision was reached to negotiate, but the hostage-takers turned down a request for more time.[9]
At 17:25 the commander of the elite Sayeret Matkal special forces group was given the 'green light' to storm the building. The assault force was divided into three units; two to break in from the entrance while a third was to climb a ladder and enter from a window facing north. The squads moved into position from the blind side to the east, from the frames of some apartment buildings under construction. The operation was to have been coordinated with simultaneous sniper fire on the three hostage-takers. At 17:32 the first squad entered the building through the main entrance on the first floor, which was blocked with tables and chairs. The first three-man team, led by Yuval Galili of Kibbutz Geva, was hit by gunfire on the stairs leading to the second floor. Galili threw a phosphorus grenade into the second floor hallway to create a smokescreen. The smoke from the explosion blinded the second team led by Amiran Levine, which had been ordered to take out Linou, at that time posted at the third floor window where he had shot Zerach.[citation needed]
When they broke into the classroom where the students were being held, Harbi grabbed a student, Gabi Amsalem, and held him at gunpoint on the floor. Rahim was shot dead but Linou managed to reach the classroom, grab several magazines from the teacher's desk and reload his weapon. He then sprayed the students with machinegun fire and tossed grenades out the window. When a burst of fire broke his left wrist, he threw two grenades at a group of girls huddled on the floor. Several students leaped from the windows to the ground, some 10 feet (3.0m) below.[citation needed]
Beside the three DFLP militants, twenty-two high school students were killed in the attack and over fifty were wounded. The student victims were buried in their hometown, Safed.[10] Some of the 10,000 mourners who attended the funerals chanted "Death to the terrorists".[4]
The next day Israel Defense Forces planes bombed offices and training bases of the DFLP and PFLP. According to a BBC report, the bombing inflicted damage in seven Palestinian refugee camps and villages in southern Lebanon killing at least 27 people and leaving 138 injured.[4]
After an investigation Attorney GeneralMeir Shamgar decided that the three teachers who escaped and abandoned their students had done no wrong. Parents of the victims angrily rejected the report.[11]
The massacre led to the creation of the Yamam special police unit.[12][13]
Amos Horev, President of Haifa's Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, headed a Commission of Inquiry in May 1975 that investigated the massacre. The subsequent Commission Report listed a number of mistakes made by the government and security forces, and made several recommendations.[14]
In 2007, American filmmakers visited Ma'alot to film a documentary on the massacre. A memorial corner in the library of the Netiv Meir school displays photographs of the victims and archival footage on the massacre. A feature movie, Their Eyes Were Dry, retells the story of the massacre.[2]
Ma'alot massacre victim avenue (Sderot Kam) in Ramat Gan.
A Reform synagogue in southern California is named Shir Ha-Ma'alot ("Song of Ascent") in memory of the victims.[16]
The Munich massacre was a terrorist attack during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany, carried out by eight members of the Palestinian militant organisation Black September. The militants infiltrated the Olympic Village, killed two members of the Israeli Olympic team, and took nine other Israeli team members hostage. Those hostages were later also killed by the militants during a failed rescue attempt.
The Black September Organization (BSO) was a Palestinian militant organization founded in 1970. Besides other actions, the group was responsible for the assassination of the Jordanian Prime Minister Wasfi Tal, and the Munich massacre, in which eleven Israeli athletes and officials were kidnapped and killed, as well as a West German policeman dying, during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, their most publicized event. These attacks led to the creation or specialization of permanent counter-terrorism forces in many European countries.
Yamam, also known as National Counter-Terrorism Unit, is Israel's national counter-terrorism unit, one of four special units of the Israel Border Police. The Yamam is capable of both hostage-rescue operations and offensive take-over raids against terrorist targets in civilian areas. Besides military and counter-terrorism duties, it also performs tactical unit duties and undercover police work.
The Kiryat Shmona massacre was an attack by three members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command on civilians in Kiryat Shmona, Israel during the Jewish holiday of Passover on 11 April 1974. Eighteen people were killed, 8 of them children, and 16 people were wounded.
The Cave of the Patriarchs massacre, also known as the Ibrahimi Mosque massacre or the Hebron massacre, was a mass shooting carried out by Baruch Goldstein, an American-Israeli physician and extremist of the far-right ultra-Zionist Kach movement. On 25 February 1994, during the Jewish holiday of Purim, which had overlapped in that year with the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, Goldstein, dressed in Israeli army uniform, opened fire with an assault rifle on a large gathering of Palestinian Muslims praying in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron. He killed 29 people, including children as young as 12, and wounded 125 others. Goldstein was overpowered and beaten to death by survivors.
The coastal road massacre occurred on 11 March 1978, when Palestinian militants hijacked a bus on the Coastal Highway of Israel and murdered its occupants; 38 Israeli civilians, including 13 children, were killed as a result of the attack while 76 more were wounded. The attack was planned by the influential Palestinian militant leader Khalil al-Wazir and carried out by Fatah, a Palestinian nationalist party co-founded by al-Wazir and Yasser Arafat in 1959. The initial plan of the militants was to seize a luxury hotel in the Israeli city of Tel Aviv and take tourists and foreign ambassadors hostage to exchange them for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli custody.
Palestinian political violence refers to acts of violence or terrorism committed by Palestinians with the intent to accomplish political goals, and often carried out in the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Common objectives of political violence by Palestinian groups include self-determination in and sovereignty over all of the region of Palestine, or the recognition of a Palestinian state inside the 1967 borders. This includes the objective of ending the Israeli occupation. More limited goals include the release of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel and recognition of the Palestinian right of return.
Operation Bayonet was a covert operation directed by Mossad to assassinate individuals they accused of being involved in the 1972 Munich massacre. The targets were members of the Palestinian armed militant group Black September and operatives of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). Authorised by Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in the autumn of 1972, the operation is believed to have continued for over twenty years. While Mossad killed several prominent Palestinians during the operation, they never managed to kill the mastermind behind Munich, namely Abu Daoud.
Events in the year 1985 in Israel.
Events in the year 1974 in Israel.
The 1974 Nahariya attack was a raid by three Fatah militants late at night on 24 June 1974. The militants infiltrated the coastal city of Nahariya in Israel by sea from Lebanon in the first attack of its kind in the conflict. Three civilians and one Israeli soldier were killed.
The 1974 Beit She'an attack, which took place during 19 November 1974, was a raid by a squad of three Palestinian militants, belonging to the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine militant organization, on the Israeli city of Beit She'an.
The Israeli Bangkok embassy hostage crisis occurred on 28 December 1972. It was a raid by a squad of four Palestinian militants, belonging to the Black September organization, on the Israeli embassy building in Bangkok in which the militants held six Israeli embassy staff hostage. After 19 hours of negotiations, the hijackers agreed to abandon the embassy in exchange for being flown to Egypt. The raid was one of a number of attacks that have been conducted against Israeli embassies and diplomats.
The Misgav Am hostage crisis, which began during the night of April 7, 1980, was a raid carried out by a squad of five Palestinian militants belonging to the Iraqi-backed Arab Liberation Front militant organization, on the northern Israeli kibbutz of Misgav Am in which the militants captured a group of toddlers and babies in the children's sleeping quarters of the kibbutz and held them as hostages. The event ended the next day with the takeover of the terrorist stronghold by Israeli special forces.
The 2001 Immanuel bus attack was an ambush attack by Palestinian militants targeting Israeli civilians on the West Bank on 12 December 2001; eleven passengers were killed in the attack and thirty were injured.
The Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine is a secular Palestinian Marxist–Leninist and Maoist organization. It is also frequently referred to as the Democratic Front, or al-Jabha al-Dīmūqrāṭiyya. It is a member organization of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Alliance of Palestinian Forces and the Democratic Alliance List.
The 1973 Hellinikon International Airport attack was an attack at the Hellinikon International Airport at Athens, Greece. The two attackers were members of the Palestinian militant organization Black September. The militants used sub-machine guns and grenades against the passengers waiting in the passenger lounge. The attackers took hostages before they finally surrendered to the Greek police. It is believed that the gunmen wanted to hijack a plane, but they decided to attack when they were about to be searched by a Greek security inspector before boarding.
On 13 January 1979 three terrorists from the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) stormed a hotel in Ma'alot, Israel in an attempt to take the guests there as hostages before being killed by Israeli soldiers.
An attack took place on the night of March 7, 2002 at the Otzem Pre-Military Preparatory School in the Israeli settlement of Atzmona in the Gaza Strip in which five of the seminary students were killed and twenty-three were injured.
Gervasi, Frank (1975). Thunder Over the Mediterranean. McKay. p.443. The day after the Ma'alot massacre, condemned by Pope Paul VI and most Western leaders as 'an evil outrage…'
Viorst, Milton (1987). Sands of Sorrow: Israel's Journey from Independence. I.B. Tauris. p.192. Faced with a public outcry over the Ma'alot massacre, they demanded of Syria a pledge to forbid terrorist to cross the Golan into Israel.
Gilbert, Martin (2001). The Jews in the Twentieth Century: An Illustrated History. Schocken Books. p.327. On 22 November 1974, six months after the Ma'alot massacre, the United Nations General Assembly voted to accept the Palestine Liberation Organisation as an...
Quandt, William B. (2001). Peace Process: American Diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli Conflict Since 1967. Brookings Institution Press. p.432. The previous day Israel had been traumatized by the Ma'alot massacre, which had resulted in the deaths of numerous schoolchildren.
Chasdi, Richard J. (2002). Tapestry of Terror: A Portrait of Middle East Terrorism, 1994–1999. Lexington Books. p.6. ...Organization (PLO) crimes, like the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games in 1972 and the Ma'alot massacre of children in 1974.
Schmid, Alex Peter; Jongman, A. J.; Stohl, Michael (2005). Political Terrorism: A New Guide to Actors, Authors, Concepts, Data Bases, Theories, & Literature. Transaction Publishers. p.639. The PFLP was responsible for the Ma'alot massacre on May 15, 1974 during which 22 Israeli children were killed.
↑ Stohl, Michael (1983). "Demystifying Terrorism: The Myths and Realities of Contemporary Political Terrorism". In Stohl, M. (ed.). The Politics of Terrorism (2nded.). Marcel Dekker. p.10.
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