Morning Advocate · 26 April 1948
CP-1948-052
Arabs Flee by Thousands as Jews Pound Jaffa in Fiercest Fighting Yet in Palestine
United Press, Jaffa, Palestine
Transcribed from the clipping
“Jaffa, Palestine, April 25 (UP)—Thousands of Arabs fled this ancient city today as men of the Jewish extremist Irgun Zvai Leumi battered the city with mortars in the fiercest attack of the five-month ‘war,’ police said tonight. Police Superintendent J. M.
Flanagan said that at least four persons were killed and 82 wounded as Irgunist mortars, firing from the ‘no-man’s-land’ between Jaffa and Tel Aviv, hammered the heart of the Jaffa business section… A Haganah broadcast tonight accused Irgun of ‘indulging in dangerous adventures.’ … Flanagan said that Arabs fled the city after British forces broke up an Irgunist road block on the Jerusalem highway, only land link between Jaffa and the rest of Palestine.
He said the mortar bombardment blew a hole in the roof of a moving picture theater on King George Ave. and caused some damage to the Jaffa post office.… He said the mortar bombardment blew a hole in the roof of a moving picture theater on King George Ave. and caused some damage to the Jaffa post office…
Police Estimate. The police official estimated casualties at two Arabs and two Jews killed and two British soldiers, 60 Arabs and 20 Jews wounded… Reports from the vicinity of Lydda said Arab troops had occupied the German village of Wilhelma near the airport.
The village had been deserted since the evacuation of its residents to Cyprus two weeks ago… British officials, questioned about the reported invasion of Palestine by troops of the British-trained Trans-Jordan legion, said flatly that there was ‘no question’ of the Trans-Jordan government taking any such action… Irgun opened its attack on Jaffa at 5 a.m. after 36 hours of preparation during which it seized hundreds of motor cars in Tel Aviv, all-Jewish twin city of Jaffa.”
Context added by this archive
Two casualty counts from the same police source on one page, twenty lines apart: at least four killed and 82 wounded in the lede, and under the subheading Police Estimate, four killed and 82 wounded broken out by nationality. The archive had the first only.
Cite this clipping
"Arabs Flee by Thousands as Jews Pound Jaffa in Fiercest Fighting Yet in Palestine," Morning Advocate, 26 April 1948, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1948-052. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1948-052
This clipping is read closely in the section below
More from Morning Advocate
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- Jews Blow Up Arab Chiefs’ HotelPortland Press Herald · 5 January 1948
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In these collections
Last updated 2 November 2026
This record is part of Covering Palestine, an archive of American newspaper clippings about Palestinians, 1724 to 2023. Researched and assembled by Maria Robles.
The clipping belongs to the newspaper that printed it, or to the news agency that supplied the copy. It is reproduced here for research, criticism and commentary. A city here is where the newspaper was published, not where the story came from, and on most records it was taken from the masthead.
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Read in: Jaffa, from 70,000 to 2,000
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