From Deception to Mass Murder: Operation Mole and the Kafr Qasim Massacre Reconsidered

On 29 October 1956, the first day of the Suez War, detachments of the Israeli Border Police massacred forty-seven Arab men, women, and children in the village of Kafr Qasim. Although the government and army denounced the atrocity, some historians have since argued that the massacre was planned by high-level military and government circles. The government’s goal, according to this view, was to drive the Arab villagers across the border in line with a contingency plan known as Operation Mole. We present an alternative view based on new documents: rather than being either part of a preconceived plan of expulsion or an aberrant individual crime, the massacre was in fact a result of an Israeli deception plan that got out of hand.