"In June 1982 Israel again invaded Lebanon, and it used aerial bombardment to destroy entire camps of Palestinian Arab refugees, By these means Israel killed 20,000 persons, mostly civilians...Israel claimed self-defense for its invasion, but the lack of PLO attacks into Israel during the previous year made that claim dubious...The [UN] Security Council demanded 'that Israel withdraw all its military forces forthwith and unconditionally to the internationally recognized boundaries of Lebanon'...
"The UN Human Rights Commission, using the Geneva Convention's provision that certain violations of humanitarian law are 'grave breaches' meriting criminal punishment for perpetrators, found a number of Israel's practices during the uprising [the intifada] to constitute 'war crimes.' It included physical and psychological torture of Palestinian detainees and their subjection to improper and inhuman treatment; the imposition of collective punishment on towns, villages and camps; the administrative detention of thousands of Palestinians; the expulsion of Palestinian citizens; the confiscation of Palestinian property; and the raiding and demolition of Palestinian houses."

[link|http://www.deiryassin.org/mas.html|Deir Yassin] had a peaceful reputation and was even said by a Jewish newspaper to have driven out some Arab militants.

Of about 144 houses, 10 were dynamited. The cemetery was later bulldozed and, like hundreds of other Palestinian villages to follow, Deir Yassin was wiped off the map. By September, Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Poland, Rumania, and Slovakia were settled there over the objections of Martin Buber, Cecil Roth and other Jewish leaders, who believed that the site of the massacre should be left uninhabited. The center of the village was renamed Givat Shaul Bet.

"By 1948, the Jew was not only able to 'defend himself' but to commit massive atrocities as well. Indeed, according to the former director of the Israeli army archives, 'in almost every village occupied by us during the War of Independence, acts were committed which are defined as war crimes, such as murders, massacres, and rapes'... Uri Milstein, the authoritative Israeli military historian of the 1948 war, goes one step further, maintaining that 'every skirmish ended in a massacre of Arabs.'"

The village was an Arab Muslim stonecutter community of about 750 people, located a few kilometers east of Kastel on a rocky hillside west of Jerusalem and two kilometers south of the Tel-Aviv highway. Lying inside the United Nations' proposed Jerusalem international zone, its terraced stone houses descended eastward to meet a quarry-studded pathway from Jewish Jerusalem's western suburb, Givat Shaul.(9)

Goldshmidt, raised in that suburb, had been sworn by his father to avenge armed attacks emanating from Deir Yassin against Givat Shaul during Arab-Jewish-British strife of the 1920s and 1930s. But during the 1948 conflict, Deir Yassin was studiously honoring a Haganah-sponsored agreement to refrain from hostilities with neighboring Jewish areas in exchange for protection from Jewish attack. One Lehi member, David Siton, protested that hitting a nonhostile village might endanger western Jerusalem. A Lehi reconnaissance appears to have confirmed the village's nonhostility. And although Irgun district commander Mordechai Raanan insisted Deir Yassin was part of an Arab logistical route to Kastel, he had to concede after another reconnaissance that the town appeared docile.(10)

In fact, the town had nurtured its quietness vigilantly, training guards for watch patrols and carefully maintaining contacts with both sides. Villagers provided intelligence to the Haganah and even cooperated while the Haganah took the strategic Sharafa ridge between Deir Yassin and the nearby ALA base at Ein Kerem. Deir Yassin repeatedly repelled, once with reported loss of life, ALA attempts to infiltrate troops into Deir Yassin. Haganah intelligence confirmed in a secret report after Deir Yassin's capture that the town had stayed "faithful allies of the western [Jerusalem] sector."(11) Yona Ben-Sasson, Haganah commander in Givat Shaul, later recalled that "there was not even one [hostile] incident between Deir Yassin and the Jews,"(12) despite increasing Arab military activity in the vacinity.