The people of al-Bassa got their lesson in imperial brutality when the British soldiers came after dawn.
Machine guns mounted on Rolls Royce armoured cars opened fire on the Palestinian village before the Royal Ulster Rifles arrived with flaming torches and burned homes to the ground.
Villagers were rounded up while troops later herded men onto a bus and forced them to drive over a landmine which blew up, killing everyone on board.
A British policeman photographed the scene as women tended to the remains of their dead, before maimed body parts were buried in a pit.
It was the autumn of 1938 and UK forces were facing a rebellion in Palestine, under British control after the defeat two decades earlier of the Ottoman Empire.
Britain’s raid on al-Bassa was part of a declared policy by the local commander of “punitive” action against entire Palestinian villages – this one after a roadside bomb had killed four British soldiers – regardless of any evidence over who was responsible.
The atrocity was revealed in accounts by soldiers and villagers decades after the UK left. It now forms part of a file being brought to the British government seeking accountability for Palestinians subjected to alleged war crimes by UK forces.
The petition, involving a 300-page dossier of evidence, asks for a formal acknowledgement and apology for abuses during the period of British rule in Palestine from 1917 until 1948, after which Britain rapidly withdrew and the State of Israel was declared.
A BBC review of the historical evidence involved includes details of arbitrary killings, torture, the use of human shields and the introduction of home demolitions as collective punishment. Much of it was conducted within formal policy guidelines for UK forces at the time or with the consent of senior officers.
“I wanted people to know that my parents, as young as teenagers, they suffered. And those who died, we have to speak for them now,” said Eid Haddad, the son of two survivors of al-Bassa.
In a statement the UK Ministry of Defence said it was aware of historical allegations against armed forces personnel during the period and any evidence provided would be “reviewed thoroughly”.
The request for an apology is likely to reopen the debate over delivering modern-day accountability for colonial-era crimes, while also being viewed in the context of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The two communities assess Britain’s historical legacy from different standpoints, while both at varying times resisted hostility, abuses or broken promises during UK rule.
It is being brought by Munib al-Masri, 88, a well-known Palestinian business owner and former politician, who was shot and wounded by British troops as a boy in 1944.
“[Britain’s role] affected me a lot because I saw how people were harassed… we had no protection whatsoever and nobody to defend us,” Mr al-Masri told the BBC at his home in Nablus in the occupied West Bank.
Two senior international lawyers are involved in the project, asked by Mr al-Masri to carry out an independent review of the evidence. They are Luis Moreno Ocampo, former chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, and the British barrister Ben Emmerson KC, former UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism.
Mr Emmerson says the legal team has unearthed evidence of “shocking crimes committed by certain elements of the British Mandatory forces systematically on the Palestinian population”.
“They are some of them of such enormous gravity that they would have been regarded even then as breaches of customary international law,” he told the BBC.