Estimates of the number of Arabs who died at Deir Yassin varied wildly. Haganah soldier Daniel Spicehandler said he saw “maybe some fifty dead." Shimon Monita, the Haganah spy in Lehi, estimated 60 Arabs dead; the Lehi's Moshe Idelstein recalled the number 61 being used at the time. Haganah intelligence officer Yona Feitelson, who arrived in Deir Yassin the morning after the battle, estimated 80 dead. The Haganah's Mordechai Gihon, who was there on the afternoon of the battle itself, thought the number was in the vicinity of 150. Commander Menachem Begin (later Prime Minister of Israel who concluded a peace treaty with Egypt in 1974)), wrote that the number was approximately 130. It was Mordechai Ra'anan, the Irgun Zivi Leumi (IZL) commander in Deir Yassin, who first used the figure 254. In an interview years later, Ra'anan was asked how he arrived at that number, which he gave to the media a few hours after the battle. He replied: “On that day I did not know, could not have known, how many Arabs had been killed. No one counted the bodies. People estimated that 100 or 150 people were killed. I told the reporters that 254 were killed so that a big figure would be published, and so that the Arabs would panic not only in Jerusalem but across the country, and this goal was accomplished. Reporters, journalists, researchers and historians treat it as if it were an established fact requiring no investigation, and nobody bothered to check what the true figure was. “The groups that carried out the massacre exaggerated the numbers in order to frighten Palestinian residents into leaving their villages and cities without resistance," some Jewish sources claimed. In 1987, the Research and Documentation Center of Bir Zeit University, a prominent Arab university in the territory now controlled by the Palestinian Authority, published a comprehensive study of the history of Deir Yassin, as part of its “Destroyed Palestinian Villages Documentation Project." The purpose of the project, according to its directors, is “to gather information from persons who lived in these villages and were directly familiar with them, and then to compare these reports and publish them in order to preserve for future generations the special identity and particular characteristics of each village." The study indicated that “The [historical] sources which discuss the Deir Yassin massacre unanimously agree that number of victims ranges between 250-254", and that “the groups which carried out the massacre exaggerated the numbers in order to frighten Palestinian residents into leaving their villages and cities without resistance." [email protected]
