http://arabia.com/article/0,1690,News-11616,00.html Israel demanded to admit 1948 Tantura massacre Arab Israeli MPs called on the government to take responsibility for a massacre of Palestinians by Jewish terrorists during the Arab-Israeli war of 1948. January 23, 2000, 04:11 PM OCCUPIED JERUSALEM (Agencies) - Arab Israeli MPs called on the government Sunday to take responsibility for a massacre of Arab villagers by Jewish terrorists during the Arab-Israeli war of 1948. The appeal was launched after an investigation by an Israeli researcher revealed that the Israeli army had massacred between 100 and 200 Palestinians in the Arab village of Tantura, near the northern city of Haifa on the night of May 23, 1948. MP Taleb Sana told AFP that he, along with nine other Arab MPs, had submitted an urgent request to parliament calling on the government to take responsibility "for all the massacres carried out by its army in 1948". "The Israeli government must take responsibility for what has happened and compensate the (families of) victims of all massacres," said Sana. "The government has not yet followed up on our request," said Sana, adding that the Jewish state was trying to eliminate the massacres from memory. Another Arab MP Azmi Bishara welcomed the publication of the research by the Israeli press, saying it was a sign of "progress" that such issues could be brought to the Israeli public’s attention. An Israeli military spokesman said that the army’s history services had no knowledge of such a massacre. Israeli researcher uncovers 1948 massacre An Israeli historian said on Tuesday that he had uncovered credible evidence that troops massacred 200 Palestinians in a single village on the day Israel came into being in 1948. Teddy Katz, who researched events in the village of Tantura for a masters degree, said he had spoken to witnesses including soldiers who were present to support his findings. “It started at night and was over in a few hours,” Katz said of the attack on May 15, 1948. “From testimonies and information I got from Jewish and Arab witnesses and from soldiers who were there, at least 200 people from the village of Tantura were killed by Israeli troops...” ”From the numbers, this is definitely one of the biggest massacres,'' he told Reuters. The Israeli army said in a statement it had no evidence of a massacre in Tantura in May 1948. But the army said once it had the research in hand, ``it will be able to conduct a renewed examination of the subject.'' When the British high commissioner for Palestine departed in mid-May under a U.N. partition plan envisaging Jewish and Arab states, the Jews proclaimed the state of Israel. This prompted Arab armies to invade Israeli territory, and long-running skirmishes became open warfare. Katz said 14 Israeli soldiers were killed in the attack on the village. The man who led the assault was quoted Tuesday as saying the villagers' deaths were a consequence of war and that reports of a massacre were “just stories.'' Katz said the attack was mentioned in only a handful of Palestinian history books and in the Israeli army archives. Tantura, near Haifa in northern Israel, numbered 1,500 residents at the time. It was later razed to make way for a parking lot for a nearby beach and the Nahsholim kibbutz, or cooperative farm. Katz said the killing spree in Tantura was “more tragic and bigger'' than in the village of Deir Yassin just west of Jerusalem, where scores of Palestinians were killed on April 9, 1948, in an assault by Jewish armed groups. Reports just after the Deir Yassin killings spoke of some 240 deaths, though Israeli and Palestinian historians now accept that the number of fatalities was probably no more than 120. Deir Yassin defining symbol Deir Yassin has long stood as the defining symbol of what Palestinians call al-Nakba (The Great Catastrophe). They use the term to refer to their dispossession and exile when up to 700,000 Palestinians fled their towns and villages or were driven out by Jewish troops in the conflict between Arab and Jew that surrounded Israel's creation. Fawzi Tanji, now 73 and a refugee at a camp in the West Bank, is from Tantura and worked until May 1948 as a guard for the army in British Mandate Palestine. He told Reuters he had watched as Israeli troops took over the village, lined men up against a cemetery wall and shot them. Katz said 95 men were killed at the cemetery. © 2000 Arabia Online Ltd.