On This Day

31 October

GENERAL BOASTS OF MASSACRING EGYPTIAN CIVILIAN CAPTIVES
On this day in 1956, Israeli general Arye Biro started massacring captive Egyptian civilians. Paratroopers had found two large tents with civilian Egyptian workers and took them captive. Birye boasted about his killings in Israeli daily, Maariv, in 1995. His soldiers “got rid of them. They were a burden…They died and that's it...There were exactly 49. We tied their hands and made them go down to the quarry. They were startled, broken and shattered”. No action was taken against the killers or their commanders.

 

 

تباهى الجنرال بمذابح الاسرى المصريين المدنيين

31 أكتوبر

في مثل هذا اليوم من عام 1956، بدأ الجنرال الإسرائيلي آري بيرو يذبح المدنيين المصريين الأسرى. عثر المظليون على خيمتين كبيرتين فيها عمال مصريين مدنيين حيث تم أسرهم. تفاخر بيرو لصحيفة معاريف الإسرائيلية عام 1995 بانه شارك في قتل الاسرى. "تخلصنا منهم. لقد كانوا عبئا ... ماتوا وهذا كل شيء ... كان هناك 49 بالضبط. قيدنا أيديهم وجعلناهم ينزلون إلى المحجر. لقد أصيبوا بالذهول والكسر والتحطم". لم يتم اتخاذ أي إجراء ضد القتلة أو قادتهم.

 According to the Los Angeles Times
In response to Egypt’s request, Israel’s Foreign Ministry on Tuesday asked defense officials to investigate a retired general’s claim that he and other Israeli soldiers killed scores of Egyptian prisoners of war in the 1956 Sinai campaign.

The assertion by Arye Biro and other soldiers in the Israeli-Egyptian war are potentially embarrassing to Israel and its most important Arab ally, forcing them to confront events of nearly 40 years ago when they were bitter enemies. The case reaches high into Israel’s honored military elite because Biro’s commanding officers were former Defense Minister Ariel Sharon and former Chief of Staff Rafael Eytan--both colonels at the time and now right-wing members of the Knesset, or Parliament.

Egyptian officials summoned Israeli diplomats in Cairo on Monday to ask them to clarify the general’s boastful account of the wartime killings. It was published in the Israeli newspaper Maariv earlier this month.

Uri Avneri, a journalist and leftist former member of the Knesset, said he had tried to publish accounts of the killings for decades but was prohibited by government censors. He said the Egyptian government also knew about the killings and chose not to make an issue of them.

Maariv explained that it completed its report in December, 1993, but complied with Israeli censors’ demands not to publish it. But the editors said they decided to print the report because the army’s own history department recently published an account of the killings by historian Moti Golani.

Biro told of landing in the Sinai, east of the Mitla Pass, on Oct. 29, 1956, as commander of a paratroop company in Eytan’s Battalion 890--part of Sharon’s 202 Parachute Brigade.

Paratroopers found two large tents with civilian Egyptian workers and took them captive. Two days later, they moved out toward Ras Sudar and killed their prisoners, he said.

“There were exactly 49,” Biro said. “We tied their hands and made them go down to the quarry. They were startled, broken and shattered. Raful [Eytan’s nickname] didn’t give an explicit instruction, and I didn’t ask for one. Only a fool can ask his commander for permission to do what he has to do.

“Anyway, I can tell you that Raful didn’t mourn over the bodies of the workers at Parker Quarry,” he says. “He didn’t even punish those who finished the job and got rid of them. They were a burden...They died and that’s it.”

He then tells of a prisoner who had escaped into the desert with bullet wounds but returned to the Israeli soldiers rather than die of thirst. “I’m not responsible for the enemy’s stupidity, and surely he very quickly found himself together with his friends,” Biro told Maariv.

“As for the question who exactly shot or didn’t shoot the workers at the quarry, why is it important? Between us, the main thing is that they shot,” he said."

On another occasion, according to Lieutenant Colonel (reserves) Shaul Ziv, then aged 17, a soldier in Platoon 5
, ...after we removed the dead bodies from the truck we found that there were about 20 people still living. Most of them were bleeding. One had a hole in the arm, another in the jaw but they were alive. I have no idea how they survived after that barrage of fire. Perhaps it was due to the huge mass of people in the truck who, with their bodies absorbing one bullet after another, shielded those who managed to push back into the center. I don’t know. In any case, I remember clearly that when the truck was emptied of the bodies, our guys tied the hands of those who were still alive. At that time I did not know what was going to be done with them and I was already concerned with entirely different matters. I think that I received an order to move to Sharm al-Sheikh and was hurrying to get my gear in order. Suddenly I saw our storage manager, H., who was never considered to be a big hero, and K., Biro’s deputy, running towards the truck, climbing into the driver’s compartment and starting to fire barrages inside. I froze. They did not stop for a second, they did not take a rest to change clips in their guns. They fired and fired and fired until their arms got tired. I do not remember whether any other guy joined them in that massacre, but I clearly remember the two of them standing in the driver’s compartment and pounding the 20 prisoners tied in the truck.