Deir Yassin is a Palestinian village of about 750 residents sitting on high ground between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, outside the borders the United Nations had drawn for a Jewish state. Before dawn on April 9, 1948, Irgun and Stern Gang fighters under Menachem Begin, acting with Haganah authorization as part of Plan Dalet, moved in to take the village. The film lays out what followed: more than 100 men, women, and children killed, many in what witnesses and later accounts describe as a systematic massacre rather than a battle. Fifty-three children left orphaned by the attack were found dumped along the wall of Jerusalem's Old City, where Hind Husseini took them in, founding what became the Dar El-Tifl El-Arabi orphanage. The film treats the massacre as a hinge point in the story of the 1948 war and the Palestinian exodus, using it to press a broader argument about how that history has been told and denied. It closes on the orphanage as the one institution that grew directly out of the village's destruction.