On August 12 1949, members of an Israel Defence Forces (IDF) unit at the Nirim outpost in the Negev desert were celebrating the successful establishment of their new camp, close to the recently agreed armistice line with Egypt. What happened at that party was long-hidden, until a 2003 investigation by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz brought to light the horrific events.
Earlier in the day, the unit had captured a Bedouin girl who at that party was gang-raped, then later executed and buried in a shallow grave. Twenty soldiers, including the unit’s commander, were sent to prison for their actions. The investigation inspired the Palestinian writer Adania Shibli’s book Minor Detail (2020), which tells the story of this event alongside that of a fictional woman investigating the crime decades later in the Palestinian city of Ramallah.
