Tel Hashomer Hospital was flooded today with cables and telephone calls from Puerto Rico and elsewhere from relatives desperate to know the names of the victims of the Lydda Airport carnage. Identification of victims was delayed, however, because luggage and documents were scattered and in some cases destroyed. By this evening nine of the injured had been released from Tel Hashomer and two from Beilinson Hospital. Ten victims were on the critical list, and many of those shot were said to face the loss of the use of their hands, legs or both.
Of the six known Jewish dead, four were identified as Prof. Aharon Katzir-Katchalsky, 58, of the Weizmann Institute of Science; Yehoshua Berkowitz, a customs official; Adam Zamir; and Henia Tartner, a 39-year-old mother of three who was at the air-port to meet her husband. The Injured included the following, all believed to be Israelis: Aneta Kaufmann, Pnina Goldberg, Liza Geron, Shaul Morgenstein, Reuben Yanevi, Henri Ben-Shitrit, Bety Gast, Simona Morgenstern, Chaim Marina, Nadia Kurtz, Sarah Cohen, Isidor Stern, Mendel Steinberg and Shlomo Blachner.
Japanese Ambassador Aeiji Tokura visited Tel Hashomer to express regrets and to wish the injured a speedy recovery. Later, in a special broadcast on television speaking in Hebrew, he expressed his government’s regret over the “massacre.”
Premier Golda Meir cut short her Swiss vacation and visited Tel Hashomer in tears last night, and looked shaken as she left. She also went to the scene of the shooting. Deputy Premier Yigal Allon and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan paid their respects at the hospital Dayan called the incident an act of insanity and condemned what he called the hiring of Japanese to do Arab dirty-work.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
