Ma'alot Massacre - The Attack

The Attack

Ma'alot, located on a plateau in the hills of the Western Galilee region of Israel, six miles south of the Lebanese border, is a development town founded in 1957 by Jewish immigrants, mainly from Morocco and Tunisia. The attack was carried out by three members of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine dressed in Israel Defense Force uniforms.

The Palestinian militants infiltrated through the Nahal Mattat nature reserve from south of the Lebanese village of Ramish. The group entered Israel near Moshav Zar'it on Sunday night, May 13. They were armed with AK-47 assault rifles, hand 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 could not follow the trail, and mistakenly reported to superiors that the footprints belonged to smugglers.

Proceeding to Ma'alot up the winding road, they encountered a van driven by a Druze resident of Hurfiesh bringing Christian Arab women from the village of Fassuta home from work at the Ata textile works in the Haifa Bay area. The leader of the operation, Lini, 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 backwards up the hill towards Moshav Tzuriel.

Reaching Ma'alot, the militants knocked on the doors of several homes. Fortuna and Yosef Cohen heard the noise and opened their door. The miltanys shot 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 beat and shot him, leaving him for dead.

Netiv Meir elementary school was a three-story concrete building with apartment buildings under construction nearby. The militants entered the building at 4 a.m., taking 102 students hostage. The teenagers spending the night in the school building were out on 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 was too late to cancel the trip because all the arrangements had been made. Three of four teachers escaped by jumping through the window, abandoning their 90 pupils to their fate, which created a lot of bitterness among the parents. The teachers were immediately suspended from their posts by local authorities. 85 students and several teachers were held hostage. The students were forced to sit on the floor at gunpoint, with explosive charges between them.

In the morning, the captors demanded the release from Israeli prisons of 23 Arab and three other prisoners, including Kozo Okamoto - a Japanese national involved in the 1972 Lod Airport Massacre. Unless these conditions were met, they declared that they would kill the students. The deadline was set for 6:00 p.m. the same day.

At 10 a.m. a young man named Sylvan Zerach, at home on leave from the Army, tried to climb a water tower not far from the school building to get a closer view of what was going on. He was shot to death by one of the hostage-takers. At an emergency session of the Knesset, a decision was reached to negotiate, but the hostage-takers turned down a request for more time.