The people of al-Bassa got their lesson in imperial brutality when the British soldiers came after dawn.
Machine guns mounted on Rolls Royce armoured cars opened fire on the Palestinian village before the Royal Ulster Rifles arrived with flaming torches and burned homes to the ground.
Villagers were rounded up while troops later herded men onto a bus and forced them to drive over a landmine which blew up, killing everyone on board.
A British policeman photographed the scene as women tended to the remains of their dead, before maimed body parts were buried in a pit.
It was the autumn of 1938 and UK forces were facing a rebellion in Palestine, under British control after the defeat two decades earlier of the Ottoman Empire.
— source bbc.com | Tom Bateman | 7 Oct 2022
