“Arabs Flee by Thousands as Jews Pound Jaffa in Fiercest Fighting Yet in Palestine.”

One United Press dispatch, three papers on the same morning: the Morning Advocate in Baton Rouge, the Lodi News-Sentinel in California as “Arabs Flee City Under Bombs,” and the News & Observer in Raleigh. 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. A British police superintendent is quoted by name: at least four persons were killed and 82 wounded.

The same dispatch carries the objection from the other Jewish force: A Haganah broadcast tonight accused Irgun of ‘indulging in dangerous adventures.’

CP-1948-052

“Arabs Flee Jaffa as Zionist Forces Battle Way Into City.”

The Observer, from the United Press. British tanks are now firing on the Irgun, and the Haganah is pushing in from the south. An Arab defeat seemed probable, and some 60,000 civilian Arabs in the city were seeking to escape. Some boarded Lebanese schooners and sailing ships in the harbor, and others sought to flee through the Jewish lines

The photograph above it counts them again: A reported 60,000 civilian Arabs were reported attempting to escape the city. The Expositor in Brantford, Ontario, runs the fall of the Manshieh quarter the same day.

CP-1948-065

“JEWISH FORCES SEIZE A MILE OF ARAB JAFFA.”

Chicago Tribune. Headline only; the archive holds no body text for it.

CP-1948-030

“Arabs Flee Jewish Advance.”

An Associated Press photograph in the Beatrice Daily Sun, Nebraska. There is no story. The picture and its caption are the whole item: A caravan of trucks lines a street in Jaffa as residents of the Arab port city in Palestine pile their household goods aboard the vehicles during the evacuation of the city in the face of Jewish forces advancing from neighboring Tel Aviev.

CP-1948-068

“Jaffa Is a Dead City.”

The Boston Globe, the day Israel declared independence and the day after Jaffa surrendered. The subheading does the arithmetic: this correspondent found only 2000 left of its 70,000 people. The correspondent remembers what it had been: full of wild taxi drivers, donkey carts and smells of bad sanitation.

CP-1948-034

“Refugees Pin All Hopes on Nasser.”

Ten years on, a Scripps-Howard reporter in a camp outside Jericho. ‘I will show you two secrets,’ said a man with flashing black eyes outside a refugee hut near the walls of ancient Jericho. Inside the mud brick hut he untangled a muddle of old clothes and shook two objects out on the matted floor. One was a key to his abandoned house in Jaffa, Israel.

CP-1958-006