Is it older than Israel?

On the morning of 9 April 1948 about 120 fighters of the Irgun and Lehi attacked Deir Yassin, a village of some 600 people on the western edge of Jerusalem that had signed a non-aggression pact with its Jewish neighbours. The village resisted; the attackers went house to house with grenades and rifles. When it was over, somewhere between 100 and 120 villagers were dead, among them women, children and the old. Some prisoners were driven through Jerusalem and then shot.

The Haganah's own intelligence and the Red Cross delegate Jacques de Reynier, who reached the village the next day, recorded what they found. The Jewish Agency condemned the attack. Menachem Begin, who led the Irgun, later wrote that the panic it caused was worth "half a dozen battalions".

News of Deir Yassin, carried and in places exaggerated by both sides, spread through Palestine in the following weeks and did more than any battle to empty the villages. Deir Yassin itself was settled within a year. The Kfar Shaul psychiatric hospital stands on it.