Ninety Wounded In Truck Blast At Headquarters

Explosive Hidden in Orange Crates Destroys 2-Story Higher Committee Building in Jaffa; Many Women And Children Are Among Victims

By United Press, Jerusalem

Ninety Wounded In Truck Blast At Headquarters — The Beaumont Enterprise, 5 January 1948 — The Beaumont Enterprise · Beaumont, Texas · 5 January 1948

Send this clipping to somebody

Transcribed from the clipping

“JERUSALEM, Jan. 4.—Dark-skinned Jews, dressed as Arabs, slipped into all-Arab Jaffa today and blew up the crowded headquarters of the Arab higher committee and Arab underground army Najada with a truckload of dynamite hidden in orange crates. An official British report said 14 high Arabs were killed and about 90 other persons wounded, 20 seriously.

The British said many of the injured were Arab refugees, including a heavy proportion of women and children, who had been sheltered temporarily in the building for lack of safe homes elsewhere. Officials believed that the casualty total would mount. The air about the wreckage of the headquarters was filled late tonight with groans, shouts and curses of the wounded and trapped.

Palestine government, British army and Arab Red Crescent (Cross) ambulances were still hauling off the wounded and all three hospitals in Jaffa were full. Hospital staffs could not handle all the patients and an emergency call was sent for every available Arab physician in Jaffa. A storm has been beating the Holy Land for more than 24 hours.

Late tonight, rescue workers in dripping rain capes shoveled and pulled by torchlight at the wreckage. Lightning flashed and thunder rumbled across the sky… 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 1500 Jews—all believed to be Haganah men—who have been besieged in the Jewish section of the old city since last Tuesday.”

Context added by this archive

The same United Press dispatch, on a Texas front page, opening with three words the other printings do not use: dark-skinned Jews. The subheadings are “Hospitals Crowded With Arab Wounded” and “Police Station Is Damaged By Blast.” The banner across the top reads DYNAMITE.

Cite this clipping

"Ninety Wounded In Truck Blast At Headquarters," The Beaumont Enterprise, 5 January 1948, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1948-117. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1948-117