Jews Dynamite HQ of Arabs’ High Command

By Eliav Simon, United Press, Jerusalem

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“Jerusalem, Jan. 4 (U.P.)—Jews dressed as Arabs slipped into all-Arab Jaffa today and blew up the crowded headquarters of the Arab Higher Committee and the Arab underground army Najada with a truckload of dynamite hidden in orange crates. An official British report said 14 Arabs were killed and about 90 wounded, 20 seriously.

The British said many of the victims were Arab refugees, including a number of children, who had been sheltered temporarily in the building… Witnesses reported that two trucks and a limousine were involved. One truck was filled with dynamite or gelignite concealed in orange crates.

Both trucks, it was said, drove up to the two-story well guarded headquarters building and parked. The Jews in the truck filled with explosives entered the other truck or the limousine and sped off. A few moments later Jaffa was shaken by the most violent explosion in Palestine since the King David Hotel bombing in Jerusalem in 1946. 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. Besides children, the victims included members of some of the most prominent Arab families in Palestine. Clocks around the headquarters stopped at 12:40 P. M. (5:40 A. M., New York time), apparently the time the bombs went off.

Scores of men dressed as Arabs but ‘suspected of being Jews’ were rounded up by Jaffa police for questioning.”

Context added by this archive

The New York tabloid version, by the same correspondent who filed the Haifa lull story in December. It drops the word dark-skinned, keeps Arab refugees, and its last sentence is scores of men rounded up for being suspected of being Jews. The subheadings are “Jaffa’s Wildest Day” and “Worst Since King David Blast.”

It runs beside a Queens borough president trying to dynamite Robert Moses out of three jobs.

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"Jews Dynamite HQ of Arabs’ High Command," Daily News, 5 January 1948, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1948-119. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1948-119