Faizel Patel, Radio Islam News-2013-06-04

A grisly find on the 29th May by ground subsided as workers carrying out renovations in a Muslim cemetery in Jaffa, Israel uncovered six chambers full of skeletons. The remains are believed to be the remains of dozens of Palestinians killed by Zionist forces during the Nakba in 1948.

“During [the foundation’s] repair and maintenance work on the [Kazkhana] cemetery, we discovered nozzles to dig into the ground where we found the mass graves…including hundreds of skeletons and human remains of rebels, martyrs and civilians who perished during the Nakba,” head of the Islamic Movement in Jaffa, Sheikh Mohammed Najem, said in a report.

80 year old Atar Zainab a fisherman was a teenager during the final months of fighting in 1948, said he helped to collect the Arab dead in the area south of Jaffa. “I carried to the cemetery 60 bodies during a period of three or four months,”he told Agence France-Presse (AFP).

Zainab said they used to find the people in the street and most of the time didn’t know who they were. Carrying them under severe attacks from flying bullets and grenades, they could not arrange proper burial for the victims in the cemetery, the area’s main graveyard. So they had to dump bodies one on top of the other in existing family crypts in the cemetery, contrary to Muslim custom.

“We carried them early in the morning or in the night. We put women, children and men in the same place… nobody prayed for these people” added Zainab

The Kazkhana cemetery has exposed the historical facts that Israel has tried to hide and erase for over 65 years relating to the massacres committed by Zionist gangs during the 1948 Palestinian Nakba,” the report read.

“These mass graves have banished all doubts of the certainty of oral histories collected by historians of people who lived through the Nakba of 1948 and parts of the war documenting massacres in Jaffa and its suburbs,” the report added.

Around 760,000 Palestinians fled or were forced from their homes in the Nakba, which marks the creation of Israel on the rubble of Palestine. In 1950, the city was incorporated into the city of Tel Aviv which was renamed Tel Aviv-Jaffa.

Each year on May 15, Palestinians mourn the loss of Palestine and creation of Israel on its rubble in 1948. Millions of Palestinians are still living in neighboring countries since the creation of Israel.

The Nakba, or “Catastrophe,” refers to the expropriation and mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland by Zionists.