The siege of Jaffa was a military engagement between the French army under Napoleon Bonaparte and Ottoman forces under Ahmed al-Jazzar. On the 3 of March, 1799, the French laid siege to the city of Jaffa, which was under Ottoman control. It was fought from 3 to 7 March 1799. On the 7 March, French forces managed to capture the city. For the pillaging of the city, the rape and murder of its civilian population by Napoleon’s troops, and the execution of the Ottoman prisoners of war, the siege of Jaffa has been called “one of the most tragic episodes of [Napoleon’s] Egyptian campaign.”

The fortress of the city of Jaffa was surrounded by 12-foot high walls, and extensive fortifications constructed by the Ottomans. Ahmed al-Jazzar entrusted its defense to his troops, including 1,200 artillerymen. All the exterior works could be besieged and a breach was feasible. The siege began March 3 at noon and continued to March 7, when Bonaparte sent an officer and a trumpeter to Ahmed al-Jazzar with a message calling on him to surrender, saying, “he [Bonaparte] is moved by the evil that will befall the city if it subjects itself to this assault.” In reply, Ahmed decapitated the messengers, displayed the head of one on the city walls, and ordered a sortie. The sortie was pushed back as early as the evening of the same day. The French managed to destroy one of the towers on the city fortifications, and despite resistance by its defenders, Jaffa was taken.

The murder of the French messengers led Napoleon, when the city fell, to allow his soldiers two days and two nights of slaughter, pillage and rape. It was a scene Bonaparte himself described as “all the horrors of war, which never appeared to me so hideous.” He also executed the Ottoman governor, Abdallah Bey.

Having taken the city, Bonaparte found himself with thousands of prisoners whose fate he had to decide. Not wishing to take on the burden of feeding the prisoners and fearing that if allowed to live they would simply rejoin the Ottoman army, Bonaparte no longer wished to honor the promises of his stepson Eugène de Beauharnais for prisoners’ lives to be spared. Instead, he ordered that just 20 Ottoman officers would not be executed; the rest of the prisoners (according to some sources around 2,440, according to other sources 4,100), most of them Albanians, were to be taken to the seashore south of Jaffa and shot or stabbed to death with bayonets. It took three days to accomplish this task.

The moral and legal justification – or the lack of it – for Bonaparte’s decision to execute the Ottoman prisoners was and is a matter of strong debate. In their writings and memoirs, his officers’ views ranged from reluctant approval to abhorrence. The most influential writing on the law of war at the time was Emer de Vattel’s widely discussed treatise, The Laws of Nations (1758). In it, de Vattel (1714–1767) laid out the considerations involved in the sparing or executing soldiers of a defeated army, stating: “When one has such a large army of prisoners that it is impossible to feed them, or to guard them securely, does one have the right to put them to death, or must one send them back, at the risk of being overwhelmed by them on another occasion?” Vattel goes on to say that prisoners of war should be paroled and sent back to their country of origin.

Bonaparte had had recent experience with that approach. Following his army’s recent victory over Ottoman troops at El-Arrish, he’d released prisoners taken in battle, provided that they return to Damascus and not rejoin the pasha’s forces in Jaffa or Acre, his two military objectives. Despite their assurances, the prisoners rejoined the pasha’s army, as proved by the fact that many of the prisoners taken at Jaffa were recognized by the French as having been among those pardoned in the earlier battle. The main reason Bonaparte’s defenders raise to justify executing the prisoners is that it would have put his troops at great risk: Bonaparte did not have sufficient troops to spare to escort the prisoners out of the war zone without endangering those who remained; the French didn’t have enough food to feed them; plague was endemic in the region and was spreading among the troops and adding thousands more people to their ranks would have increased the risk of the disease spreading further. The final motivation Bonaparte had was that by showing no mercy to the enemy he would strike terror in the ranks of Ahmed al-Jazzar’s troops.