Shai, Aron. “The Fate of Abandoned Arab Villages in Israel, 1965-1969.” History and Memory, vol. 18, no. 2, 2006, pp. 86–106: "In the spring of 1965, the Israel Land Administration (ILA) initiated the demolition (or to quote contemporary records, “leveling”) of more than one hundred of these abandoned Arab villages. For about fifteen years prior to the ILA initiative, some of the abandoned villages had been demolished, with just their mosques or churches left standing, while others still stood deserted. Some of the villages were well preserved, while others bore the ravages of time; some had been settled with Jewish immigrants at the Israeli government’s initiative (figures 1–4). In villages where the houses had collapsed or were on the verge of collapse, the scars of IDF urban warfare exercises could sometimes be seen, and there were signs of looting and vandalism. However, it was only in the spring of 1965 that a clear policy was established to “level” the abandoned villages with the aim of “clearing” the country, to quote the official term used at the time. The operation, which was deliberately planned and executed, unlike its predecessor in the aftermath of the 1948 war, lasted until the few weeks of political and military tension before the June 1967 Six-Day War, and was subsequently continued after the war, and even expanded to include the newly occupied territories... The demolition program affected a large number of villages, including al-Burj, Bir Ma‘in (near present-day Modi‘in), Tall al-Safi, Zakariyya (in the Elah Valley), Abu Shusha and al-Qubab (southeast of Ramle), al-Khayriyya (near Jaffa; the place later became the central garbage tip), and in the north—Lubya (east of Tiberias), Dalaata (near Safed), and the small town of Saffuriyya (now the Tzippori national park)."
Israel and the Occupied Territories. International Religious Freedom Report 2005. United States Department of State, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (2006)
