"Butcher of Tantura" who boasted of murdering Palestinians dies

The "butcher of Tantura," who often boasted of murdering unarmed Palestinians after invading their tiny Mediterranean hamlet in the summer of 1948, is dead. He was 96.

By Syed Zafar Mehdi

The "butcher of Tantura," who often boasted of murdering unarmed Palestinians after invading their tiny Mediterranean hamlet in the summer of 1948, is dead. He was 96.

Amitzur Cohen was trained as a member of the Lehi Zionist terrorist group and committed some of the most horrific crimes against humanity, including the Tantura massacre.

After the illegitimate Zionist regime was created in May 1948 as part of the British project to colonize Palestine, hundreds of Palestinian villages and towns were ethnically cleansed and destroyed.

On the intervening night of May 22-23, the Palestinian coastal village of Tantura, home to around 1,500 people, was among the last to be ambushed and occupied by the Israeli army's Alexandroni Brigade, leaving a trail of death and destruction in its wake.

In his book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, historian Benny Morris writes that the occupying regime's forces made the decision to "expel or subdue" native Palestinians in Tantura.

An Israeli military communiqué issued a day after the Tantura massacre brazenly boasted that "hundreds of Arabs and a great deal of booty have fallen into our hands".

According to activists and researchers, more than 200 Palestinians were killed and buried in a mass grave measuring 115 feet by 13 feet after the Zionist terror group carried out a bloodbath.

Last year, Israeli media reported the discovery of a mass grave in the village, prompting calls from Palestinian groups for an international commission to investigate the series of massacres that followed the forcible evictions of at least 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, popularly known as known as the Day of the Nakba or Cataclysm.

An explosive documentary by Alon Schwarz titled "Tantura," which premiered at Sundance in the United States late last year, documented the chilling details of the colossal tragedy.

One of the most heinous testimonies in Schwarz's film was that of Cohen, the Zionist mass murderer, who boasted about his first few months as a soldier in the Israeli regime and how he killed for fun.

"I don't remember the number of Arabs I killed in 1948. I never counted the number because I was a killer and didn't take any prisoners," Cohen admitted, and burst out laughing.

"I did not count. I had a machine gun with 250 bullets. I can't say how many,” he said when asked how many Arab Palestinians he murdered in the May 1948 events.

Cohen eerily admitted that if a group of Arabs stood in front of him with their hands up, he would still shoot them.

The testimony in the documentary, including that of Cohen, was collected by Teddy Katz, who interviewed 135 people and collected 140 hours as part of his graduate work at Haifa University in the late 1990s. Katz was later harassed by the Israeli regime.

Cohen, who was a member of the Lehi Zionist terrorist group that eventually took the form of Israeli military forces, was known for conducting complex terrorist operations, including derailing passenger trains and planting landmines on the tracks, as noted on the Lehi website.

"Amitzur participated in Lehi operations such as derailing trains, laying mines on the tracks and blowing up the large railway bridge at Hotel HaCarmel," the website reads, referring to the railway line connecting the Palestinian Coastal city of Haifa connected to Cairo.

According to one account, Cohen joined the Lehi group "to resist and root out the Arabs in 1946" even though his father and brother were members of the "Haganah" Zionist armed gangs.

"I was looking for work when I was captured by the underground Zionist ideology," he was quoted as saying in the report. "I was ready to kill without worrying [about the consequences]."

On Saturday, the "butcher of Tantura" died at the age of 96 in the Binyamina settlement he founded in 1922 and named after French banker and Zionist supporter Benjamin de Rothschild.