Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni left Damascus that very night, on April 6, and reached Jerusalem at dawn the following morning, accompanied by fifty ALA volunteers. After a short rest, he set off for al-Qastal at the head of a force of some three hundred Palestinians and four British soldiers, who had crossed ranks to fight with the Arabs.¹² The Arab counterattack on al-Qastal began at 11 P.M. on April 7. The Arab forces broke into detachments and approached the village in a three-pronged assault. One of the Arab detachments suffered heavy casualties and nearly ran out of ammunition. As their wounded leader retreated, al-Husayni led a small detachment to take their place and attempted to lay charges under the defenses erected by the Jewish forces. But al-Husayni and his men were pinned down by heavy fire from the Jewish defenders and soon found themselves surrounded by Jewish reinforcements from nearby settlements. As dawn broke on the morning of April 8, word spread like wildfire among the Arab fighters that al-Husayni and his men were surrounded by the enemy; the battle of al-Qastal looked certain to end in defeat. However, Arab reinforcements rallied to the call, and some five hundred men joined the besieged troops at al-Qastal. They fought through the day and managed to retake the town by the late afternoon. Their joy in recovering al-Qastal was shattered when the Arab fighters found the body of Abd al-Qadir al-Husayn on the eastern periphery of the town. The Palestinian fighters vented their rage by killing their fifty Jewish prisoners. On both sides, the civil war would prove a war of atrocity. Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni was buried the following day. Ten thousand mourners attended his funeral at the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. “The people wept for him,” recalled Arif al-Arif, a native of Jerusalem and historian of 1948. “They called him the hero of al-Qastal.”¹³ The Palestinians never fully recovered from the loss of Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni. No other local leader rose to command a national resistance to the Jewish forces in Palestine, and his death was a tremendous blow to public morale. Worse yet, his death proved entirely in vain. The demoralized Arab defenders left only forty men to hold al-Qastal. Within forty-eight hours, Jewish forces retook the town—this time for good.

The death of Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni and the loss of al-Qastal were overshadowed by the massacre of the Palestinian villagers of Dayr Yasin on April 9. The massacre, which took place on the same day as al-Husayni’s funeral, sent shock waves of fear across Palestine. From that day forward, the Palestinians had lost the will to fight. Dayr Yasin was a peaceful Arab village of some 750 residents located to the west of Jerusalem. It was a mixed village of farmers, masons, and merchants. There were two mosques and two schools, one for boys and one for girls, and a sporting club. It was the last village in Palestine to expect a Jewish attack, for the residents had concluded a nonaggression pact with the Jewish commanders in Jerusalem. The Irgun and Lehi gave no reason for their unprovoked attack on Dayr Yasin. Palestinian historian Arif al-Arif believed the Jewish terror organizations targeted the village “to give their own people hope and to fill the hearts of the Arabs with terror.”¹⁴ The attack on Dayr Yasin began in the predawn hours of April 9, 1948. With only eighty-five armed men facing a superior Jewish force supported by armored cars and aircraft, panic spread among the villagers. One peasant woman was breastfeeding her baby when the fighting erupted. “I heard the tanks and rifles, and smelled the smoke. I saw them coming. Everybody was yelling to their neighbours, ‘If you know how to leave, leave!’ Whoever had an uncle tried to get the uncle. Whoever had a wife tried to get the wife.? She ran for her life with her baby son in her arms, to the neighboring village of ?Ayn Karam.¹⁵ Though there were Arab Liberation Army units in Ayn Karam, and British police nearby, no one came to the villagers’ rescue. Eyewitnesses reported that the Jewish attackers gathered all of the armed Arab defenders and shot them. Arif al-Arif, the Palestinian chronicler, interviewed a number of survivors of Dayr Yasin soon after these events and catalogued the horrors of the day, naming names and detailing deaths. “Among the atrocities,” he recounted, they killed al-Haj Jabir Mustafa, a ninety-year-old man, and threw his body from the balcony of his home into the street. They did the same to al-Haj Isma‘il’Atiyya, an old man aged ninety-five, and killed his eighty-year-old wife and their grandchild. They murdered a blind youth named Muhammad Ali Khalil Mustafa and his wife, who tried to protect him, and her eighteen-month-old child. They murdered a school teacher who was tending to the wounded.¹⁶

In all, some 250 villagers were killed in Dayr Yasin. According to al-Arif ’s sources, the killing would have continued in Dayr Yasin had an older Jewish commander not given the order to stop. However, survivors were forced to march to the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem, where they were “publicly reviled before the Jewish people, as if they were criminals,” before they were finally released near the Italian hospital near Hayy al-Mismara.¹⁷ Between the massacre of innocent villagers and the brutal humiliation of survivors, Dayr Yasin provoked universal condemnation. The Jewish Agency denounced the atrocity and distanced its Haganah forces from the extremists of the Irgun and Lehi. The massacre at Dayr Yasin provoked a mass exodus of Palestinian Arabs that continued right up to the British withdrawal on May 15. As word of the killing spread, al-Arif explained, people across Palestine “began to flee their homes, carrying with them different accounts of Jewish atrocities which left people shuddering in horror.” The political leadership only exacerbated fears by publishing accounts of Dayr Yasin and other atrocities in the Arab press. Although the Palestinian leaders hoped to force the Arab states to intervene by playing on the humanitarian crisis, their reports only served to reinforce the fear and encourage villagers to abandon their homes.¹⁸ Time and again, contemporary accounts make reference to townspeople and villagers across Palestine taking their loved ones and abandoning their homes and possessions out of fear of another Dayr Yassin. Palestinians had already begun fleeing the territory earlier in the spring. Between February and March 1948, some 75,000 Arabs had left their homes in the towns that were the center of fighting, such as Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Haifa, for the relative safety of the West Bank or neighboring Arab states.¹⁹ That April, after Dayr Yasin, the stream of refugees became a flood.

Some Palestinians chose to fight horror with horror. Four days after the massacre at Dayr Yasin, on April 13, Palestinian fighters ambushed a Jewish medical convoy heading to Mount Scopus on the edge of Jerusalem. The two ambulances were clearly marked with medical insignia, and the passengers were in fact doctors and nurses of the Hadassah Hospital and employees of the Hebrew University. There were 112 passengers in the convoy. Only 36 survived. The brutality of the ambush was captured in a series of grisly photographs in which the attackers posed in triumph next to the bodies of their victims. These barbaric photographs were sold commercially in Jerusalem, as if to demonstrate to the Arabs of Palestine that they could destroy the Jewish threat. Yet photographs of atrocity could not dispel the air of defeat that permeated the towns and countryside of Palestine in April 1948. Palestinian morale had been shattered, and the massacre of Jewish civilians at Mount Scopus only heightened fears of further atrocity and Jewish retribution. Sensing the collapse in public morale, the Haganah stepped up its operations in line with a military plan known as Plan D for the depopulation and destruction of Palestinian towns and villages deemed necessary to establish a viable Jewish state.