ARABS ATTACK CONVOY

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 68, Issue 142, 29 March 1948, Page 3

ARABS ATTACK CONVOY

42 JEWS KILLED \ British Arrange Truce IN.Z.PiA..— Copyright!. (Rec. 10.40.) JERUSALEM, March 28. Two hundred and fifty Arabs killed 42 Jews in a convoy of six vehicles which they ambushed yesterday at Kabiri, near the coast of Northern Palestine, says an official announcement British military headquarters announced that it had arranged a truce between 1200 Arabs and survivors from the ambushed Jewish convoy who were entrenched in'an abandoned village near Bethlehem. Later British troops brought out alive nearly 100 Haganah men and 10 Jewish women. Inside*a bullet-pitted house, where the main stand was made, the troops found four dead Jews and 45 wounded women. The bodies of other men lay on the roadway. Hundreds of Arabs streamed down from the hills during the truce, but British troops kept them at bay. The Haganah leader told Reuter’s correspondent that the convoy began with 35 lorries.and 14 armoured cars. The Arabs destroyed all but eight lorries and six armoured cars, which the Jews formed into a protective barrier around the house. Prior to the truce, survivors of the Jewish convoy continued to make a last-ditch stand. There was a temporary cessation of firing when about 200 British troops, after negotiating Arab road blocks at 300-yard intervals from - Bethlehem, reached the

scene. The British troops took up a i position one and a-half miles from the besieged Jews, but did not intervene. The Arabs warned the British that they would attack them if they tried to help the Jews.

Appeal by Rabbi The truce was arranged after Palestine’s Chief Rabbi, Dr. Isaac Herzog, had appealed to the British Army to save the besieged Jews. Jewesses thronged the Jewish Agency’s offices in Jerusalem seeking news of next-of-kin who were drivers or escorts in the convoy. The Associated Press correspondent reports that Royal Artillery 25pounders broke up an Arab attack on a Jewish east of Nahariah, in Northern Palestine. Mortar firing broke out in Jerusalem’s Old City- after the Easter service in the Holy Sepulchre Church. Other incidents to-day included a British .n.c.o. killed and two officers wounded in firing in the Old City. A sniper fatally shot in the head an

Englishwoman, Mildred Marston, who was a teacher at Jerusalem’s girls’ college while she was walking to, church. A young Jewish mother whom Stern Gangites abducted from a cafe yesterday was found shot dead on vacant

ground to-day. A Jew was shot dead in Rehoboth. British troops deton-

ated an unexploded mine behind a Jewish shop in Jerusalem. Reuter’s correspondent says that British naval units intercepted near the Palestine coast a ship carrying 800 Jewish illegal immigrants. The

..ship - was escorted to Haifa. British troops disarmed Jewish convoy survivors in Bethlehem and escorted them to Jerusalem, from where the convoy originally started. The troops found 16 dead Jews at the scene.

Arabs in the Kabiri attack used twoinch mortars and light machine-guns, and put up roadblocks to prevent British troops reaching the Jews, but finally- withdrew in the face of fire from 25-pounder field guns. The spirit and pageantry of Easter passed almost unnoticed in the Holy City, says the correspondent of the •Associated Press. The bark of moi’tars and the chatter of automatic weapons in ArabJewish clashes almost drowned the early morning bells. Only the devout few braved the dangers to worship. Archbishop M'onseigneur Arthur Hughes read Pontifical High Mass in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and led the procession to the tomb after a service at the Stone of the Holy Unction. A few members of the Consular Corps ran the gauntlet of sni\pers’ bullets to attend the service'.