Hotel Bombed In Jerusalem, 50 Are Killed

British Headquarters, Palestine Secretariat Blasted by Terrorists

By the Associated Press, Jerusalem

Hotel Bombed In Jerusalem, 50 Are Killed — Evening Star, 22 July 1946 — Evening Star · Washington, District of Columbia · 22 July 1946

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Transcribed from the clipping

“JERUSALEM, July 22.—Terrorists today bombed and shattered part of the huge King David Hotel, headquarters of the British Army and the Secretariat of the Palestine government, killing at least 50 persons in a terrifying blast that shook the modern part of this ancient city.

The attack came 23 days after the British Army occupied the Jewish agency and arrested 2,000 Jews and leaders. A police communique gave the estimate of dead. Among the 60 reported unofficially as injured was an American, Richard Mowrer, correspondent of the New York Post, who was reported to have suffered a broken leg while walking past the hotel.

A curfew was clamped on… Postmaster General G. D. Kennedy, a veteran of 25 years of government service in Palestine, was known to have been killed. The explosion was likened by a British Army officer to the detonation of a 500-pound bomb.

It shattered the uneasy calm of Jerusalem, torn by Jewish demands for more immigration and Arab opposition, at 12:30 p.m.… ‘I saw dead men lying on the streets,’ one eyewitness said. ‘There were severeal ATS (British Army Women’s Auxiliary) girls covered with blood from head to foot.

One man was blown clear across the street and his body hit the side of the YMCA building.’ The telephone operator at the hotel said that 15 minutes before the explosion she received an anonymous call saying the hotel was to be blown up. She was advised to flee. Instead, she spread the alarm and many guests ran from the building.

Others, accustomed to alarms, remained… While an excited crowd was standing in the street outside the hotel, 18 youth, 6 of them dressed as Arabs, appeared in a long corridor of the hotel basement. A British officer said the young men spoke in Hebrew.”

Context added by this archive

The King David Hotel, on the day, with terrorists under the headline and in the first word of the story, unattributed. The subheadings are “Postmaster General Killed” and “Warning Given By Phone.” “severeal” is the paper’s.

Cite this clipping

"Hotel Bombed In Jerusalem, 50 Are Killed," Evening Star, 22 July 1946, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1946-007. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1946-007