More Than 20,000 Arab Refugees Go to Lebanon Since Fall of Haifa April 22

By Leigh White, Chicago Daily News, Tyre, Lebanon

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“TYRE, LEBANON—ARABS REFUGEES fleeing Palestine in recent weeks have far outnumbered Jewish refugees entering Palestine in the past year. More than 20,000 Arab refugees have been admitted into Lebanon since the fall of Haifa April 22.

The total number of newcomers since the first of the year is reliably estimated at more than 60,000—or 6 percent of this little country’s population. This ancient walled Phoenician city of Tyre is the center of relief operations organized by the Permanent Palestine Office of Lebanon.

Hordes of miserable Arabs, mostly old men, women and children, arrive here daily by sailing craft from evacuation centers along the Palestinian coast. Few refugees have been able to escape by land since the Jewish Haganah mined the highway north of Haifa to prevent removal of Arab-owned motor vehicles.

A THIRD OF THE 59 WOUNDED NOW confined in a temporary hospital here are civilian victims of Jewish terrorists who seized control of Haifa following the sudden evacuation of British forces from the center of the city. Six of the wounded are women. One of them, a first-aid girl, was shot while trying to treat a wounded Arab.

Another was machine-gunned while fleeing with her family by automobile… THE HOSPITAL IS OPERATED BY VOLunteer doctors, nurses and senior medical students from the American University of Beirut. Dr. Saadallah El Khalil, chief surgeon, recently returned from the United States where he worked for a year at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn.

The director of the university’s medical relief committee is Dr. George Fawwaz, a young biochemist who lectured last year at Harvard University… I ACCOMPANIED DR. FAWWAZ ON AN inspection tour of medical aid posts along the Palestinian frontier. Everywhere I encountered great bitterness regarding American policy in Palestine.

More articulate persons with whom I spoke considered themselves the victims of the same sort of totalitarian behavior as the Jews themselves suffered at the hands of the Germans. They asked me why Americans, who previously opposed anti-Jewish terrorism of the Nazis, should now excuse and even encourage anti-Arabian terrorism of Zionists.

Nothing I could say would convince them that the American government, press and radio are not 100 percent against the Arabs and 100 percent in favor of Jews.” (Copyright, 1948, by Chicago Daily News, Inc.)

Context added by this archive

An American correspondent in Lebanon eleven days before the state was declared, counting the refugees as they land, naming the Palestinian doctors treating them, and writing “Jewish terrorists” in his own voice. The last three paragraphs are what Palestinians told him about the United States.

Printed above a Memphis Commercial Appeal filler about a woman who could not buy two screws for an iron cord. A second scan of this same page is held in the sprint folder; it is the same clipping.

Cite this clipping

"More Than 20,000 Arab Refugees Go to Lebanon Since Fall of Haifa April 22," Corpus Christi Times, 5 May 1948, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1948-083. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1948-083