'Every Arab is to be killed': Israeli 1948 files expose harrowing war orders to ethnically cleanse Palestine

New Israeli military files reveal written orders to 'kill' and 'annihilate' Palestinians as more than 700,000 were driven out in the 1948 Nakba.

The New Arab Staff
27 February, 2026



Israeli forces issued written orders to 'kill' and 'annihilate' Palestinians in 1948, newly uncovered documents reveal [Getty/file photo]


Thousands of newly uncovered Israeli military documents have revealed written orders and sworn testimony detailing the killing of civilians and the use of terror to expel Palestinians in 1948, directly contradicting the long-promoted claim that they fled voluntarily.

The documents, published on Thursday by Haaretz, were discovered in 2024 when zoologist Ronit Zilberman found boxes of archival material beside a dumpster in Tel Aviv.

The trove belonged to Rafi Kotzer, an early Golani Brigade fighter, and includes operational orders, battlefield directives and military court testimonies.

Among them is a July 1948 order written and signed by Yitzhak Broshi, commander of Golani's 12th Battalion, titled: "Conduct in captured villages where there is a population".

It instructs that if an "outside Arab", referring to a Palestinian not originally from the village, is found, he is to be shot immediately.


In villages where displaced Palestinians are discovered, troops were to shoot "every 10th man". All men sheltering in homes where property described as “stolen from Jews” is found are to be executed.

Regarding a Bedouin community in the Lower Galilee, the order states plainly: "Every Arab among the Zabahim (a specific Bedouin community) is to be killed".

Another written directive instructs troops to search for Palestinians hiding after an area was seized and to "kill anyone who is hiding". A separate document under the heading "The method" states: "Every Arab who will be met with is to be annihilated."

Senior officers later testified that such violence was not accidental.

"There were operations in which the potential enemy, namely civilians, was annihilated," Mordechai Maklef, then an operations officer who later became Israel’s chief of staff, told a military court. "The intention was to expel. It is impossible to expel 114,000 people… without terror. There had to have been an element of initial terror for them to leave."

Maxim Cohen, commander of the Carmeli Brigade, testified: "How do you expel a village? You lop off the ear of one of the Arabs before everyone else's eyes, and they all flee… We won thanks only to the fear of the Arabs, and they were fearful only of deeds that were not in accordance with the law."

Haim Ben-David, an operations officer who later became a major general, acknowledged: "We often did not behave according to those laws. We resorted to illegal means."

He said that if a Palestinian insisted on remaining in his home, "he gets a bullet", adding that such measures were implemented "with the knowledge of the High Command".

Yisrael Carmi, a battalion commander, described the seizure of Bir al-Saba: "I gave an order to annihilate anyone who appeared in the street, whether they resisted or did not resist… Until then everyone was killed – women and children and everyone."

Court records also detail cases in which prisoners were executed, villages were "cleansed", and soldiers were ordered not to take prisoners - a phrase witnesses testified was understood to mean killing them.

One verdict cited in the investigation states that soldiers were ordered "to shoot every Arab… whether it is a man or a woman, whether the Arab is armed or not, whether he flees or raises his hands and surrenders".


The report notes that nearly 800,000 Palestinians were displaced in 1948. It concludes, based on the newly accessible material, that the Israeli forces had "expelled Arabs systematically and violently", using massacres, murder and terror to expedite their flight.

Decades of archival secrecy have obscured much of this history - among 17 million files in Israel's state and military archives, more than 16 million remain inaccessible to the public.

Internal archive guidance cited by Haaretz instructed staff to conceal material that could harm the army's image by revealing "killing" and "murder".

Nearly eight decades after the founding of Israel, the newly surfaced files place signed orders and courtroom admissions into the public record, written "black on white", as the report notes, detailing directives to "kill", "annihilate" and use terror to drive Palestinians from their homes and land.