Is it older than Israel?

Tantura was a fishing village of about 1,500 people on the coast south of Haifa. On the night of 22 to 23 May 1948, nine days after the declaration of the state, the Alexandroni Brigade took it. The village surrendered within hours.

What happened afterwards was the subject of a master's thesis by Teddy Katz in 1998, built on interviews with villagers and with soldiers of the brigade, which found that dozens of unarmed men were shot after the fighting had ended. Katz was sued, retracted under pressure, and the thesis was disqualified; the interviews survive. In 2022 the documentary Tantura brought the soldiers themselves on camera describing the killings, and aerial photographs located the mass grave under what is now the car park of the Dor beach.

The survivors were expelled to Fureidis and then across the armistice lines. The village was bulldozed. Estimates of the dead range from 40 to more than 200.