Gaj massacre was a wartime massacre of the Polish population of Gaj, committed on 30 August 1943 by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army death squad aided by the Ukrainian peasants, in which 600 civilian Poles were killed, including a large number of children. The mass murder operation in Gaj was carried out during the province-wide Massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia. The (exclusively Polish) settlement (consisting of Nowy and Stary Gaj) founded in the 1920s was burned to the ground by OUN-UPA and no longer exists. When the Polish self-defence unit from nearby Rożyszcze arrived at the Gaj colony a few days later the bodies of victims were strewn everywhere. They identified and shot several Ukrainian collaborators and set their houses of fire in retaliation. The Gaj colony was located in the Kowel County (powiat kowelski) of the Wołyń Voivodeship in the Second Polish Republic (now, part of the Kovel Raion, south-east of Kovel, Ukraine).
