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Portland Press Herald · 5 January 1948

CP-1948-089

Jews Blow Up Arabs’ Hotel

Continued from Page One

United Press, Jerusalem

Jews Blow Up Arabs’ Hotel — Portland Press Herald, 5 January 1948
Portland Press Herald · 5 January 1948

Transcribed from the clipping

“British said many of the victims were Arab refugees, including a heavy proportion of children, who had been sheltered temporarily in the building for lack of safe homes elsewhere… In the midst of the wildest day Jaffa has seen since the partition, the Jewish Agency threatened to shoot up roadblocks the Arabs had set up in front of all five gates to the Old City part of Jerusalem. The Arabs want to starve out some 1,500 Jews—all believed to be Haganah men—who have been besieged in the Jewish section of the Old City since Tuesday. Food trucks have not been able to get convoys since Tuesday and the Arabs want to stop the Haganah from running in food at night. Witnesses of the blowing up of Higher Committee headquarters in Jaffa said they did not believe more than four or five men were involved. The Stern Gang telephoned the United Press and said it was responsible for the bombing… ‘The front of the building was torn off. All windows were smashed. Doors were buckled. Shops all around the headquarters were badly damaged. Barclay’s Bank next door caught fire. Pedestrians were blown off their feet for a block or more.’ W. V. Fuller, the Lydda District commissioner, who supervised rescue work, said it looked as ‘if a buzz bomb struck here.’ Besides children, the victims included members of some of the most prominent Arab families in Palestine. Auni Hannoun, member of the Arab National Committee and a nephew of the mayor of Jaffa, was wounded. A member of the Abu Laban Clan, the most influential in the coastal belt, was wounded. Authorities could understand how members of the Stern ‘black gang’ could be taken for Arabs in an all-Arab town, but they could still not explain how the Jews got in and out of the check-posts about Jaffa without being found out. Clocks around the headquarters stopped at 12.40 p. m. (5.40 a. m., est), apparently the time the bombs went off.”

Context added by this archive

The fullest version of the dispatch, on the jump page. It names two of the wounded, reports the Stern Gang telephoning the United Press to claim the bombing, and carries the other half of the week in Jerusalem: fifteen hundred Jews besieged in the Old City whom the Arabs mean to starve out. The subheadings are “Wildest Day Since Partition,” “Front Torn Off” and “Storm Hampers Rescue.”

Cite this item

"Jews Blow Up Arabs’ Hotel," Portland Press Herald, 5 January 1948. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1948-089. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1948-089

Elsewhere in the archive

This record is part of Covering Palestine, an archive of American and Anglophone newspaper clippings about Palestinians, 1812 to 2022. Researched and assembled by Maria Robles.

The clipping belongs to the newspaper that printed it, or to the wire service that supplied the copy. It is reproduced here for research, criticism and commentary.

Something wrong here, or something you know about this clipping? The archive is still being built and corrections are wanted: maria@rozumstudio.com, quoting CP-1948-089.

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