thumb|Graves of the Convoy of 35 in [[Mount Herzl.]]
The Convoy of 35 (or the Lamed He, which stands for "thirty five" in Hebrew numerals), was a convoy of Haganah and Palmach fighters sent during the 1947–48 Civil War in Mandatory Palestine on a mission to reach by foot and resupply the blockaded kibbutzim of Gush Etzion in January 1948, after earlier motorized convoys had been attacked. They were spotted before they could reach their destination and killed in a prolonged battle by Arab irregulars and local villagers.
History
thumb|January 1948 casualties of the "Convoy of 35" being brought to burial
thumb|A monument commemorating the 35 fallen fighters
On 16 January 1948, a convoy of 38 men was sent by the Haganah to deliver supplies to the four blockaded kibbutzim of Gush Etzion, south of Jerusalem, following an Arab attack on January 14. The unit, named in Hebrew "Machleket HaHar" (lit. Mountain Platoon), set out on foot from Hartuv at 11 p.m. on January 15, commanded by Dani Mass. They took a detour around the Tegart fort-type Palestine Police station, to avoid detection by the British. Three were sent back because one man sprained an ankle, and two accompanied him. The remaining 35 were killed by Arab villagers and militiamen between the villages of Jaba' and Surif.
The fate of the 35 was reconstructed from British and Arab reports. The six hours of night that remained did not suffice for the trip. About an hour before the convoy reached their destination, it became light. Their presence was discovered by two Arab women who encountered two scouts of the group near Surif. (An earlier version, that the soldiers were discovered by an Arab shepherd whom they graciously let go, was based on a eulogy written by Ben-Gurion and is apparently apocryphal. The Haganah force battled until it ran out of ammunition. The last of the 35 was apparently killed at about 4:30 p.m. Among the dead were Tuvia Kushnir, one of the country's most promising botanists, Moshe Perlstein, an American-born World War II veteran who had made aliyah in 1947, and three members of the Hebrew Communist Party.
A phone conversation about the battle was intercepted by the Irgun, in which it was heard that many were killed and some were wounded. A contemporary report puts the number of casualties in Sa'sa at 11 killed and 3 wounded, but official sources confirm the figure of 60 killed with 20 houses destroyed.
Burial
After the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, when the bodies of the 35 were returned to Israel, only 23 of the 35 bodies could be identified. To solve the problem, Rabbi Aryeh Levin performed the rare goral ha-gra (ha-gra = Vilna Gaon) ceremony, a process in which the reader of the Torah is led to certain verses which give hints as to the subjects in question. They were buried in Mount Herzl in Jerusalem.
Names of the dead
- Daniel Mass
- Yisrael Aloni
- Chaim Engel
The story of the 35 was immortalised in a poem, Here Our Bodies Lie by Haim Gouri.
Yael Zerubavel analysed remembrance of the event using the number 35 as a prominent example of the Israeli practice of "numerical commemoration".
See also
- Kfar Etzion massacre
- Gush Etzion Convoy