At least four Arabs were killed and two Jews were seriously wounded in a weekend of Palestine violence, as an Arab strike movement spread in Haifa over the reported death of three hunger-striking Arab prisoners in Acre concentration camp.
Three Arabs were slain, including the Mukhtar (village chieftain), in an attack by Arab terrorists on a village in the Acre district. Several Arabs were reported killed in an engagement with a military patrol near Nablus. Another patrol shot an Arab dead near Acre. Ammunition and threatening letters were found in his possession.
Israel Goldenburg was seriously wounded during an Arabs attack on the Jewish colony of Kfar Yavetz. As Arab women roamed through the seaport city of Haifa calling for a complete strike, Rabbi Shlomo Kokorivitz was shot and seriously wounded while walking down Mount Carmel with his wife and three-year-old boy. The child was slightly hurt.
Tension continued high in Haifa as a partial strike tied up the Arab market area and mobs assembled in various parts of the city. Police stood by to prevent a recurrence of yesterday’s incidents, when a mob attacked the police, but was dispersed. A mob also stormed a Jewish, but was repelled by armed police, with no casualties reported.
Agitation for a strike began following unconfirmed reports that three of 226 Arabs conducting a hunger strike in Acre concentration camp had died. Although the government and police did not acknowledge that a hunger strike was in progress, an inflamed mob demanded that shopkeepers shut down their establishments, and a number of them complied.
Simultaneously, a crowd in Acre set fire to three railway cars. The town was placed under curfew from one to five o’clock in the morning.
Police shot and wounded two Arabs attempting to damage an Iraq Petroleum Company pipeline near Almujeidal, and discovered a dynamite mine. It was the first time in a long series of attempts to sabotage the I.P.C. lines, carrying petroleum from the rich Mosul fields to the Haifa terminus, that the puncturing of the line was prevented. The wounded saboteurs escaped. Troops later dynamited seven Arabs’ homes in the nearby Zouriah and Axel villages in reprisal.
The colonies of Sejera, Ben Shemen and Givat Ada were subjected to heavy rifle fire, as were police stations at Nur-es-Shem, Rama and Sarafend.
Three Jewish youths, arrested while hiding behind rocks after an Arab bus had been fired on between Safed and Rosh Pina, confessed to having done the shooting. They are Abraham Shein, 20 years old; Shalom Serabin, 18, and Shlomo Ben Yussef, 22, of Poland, all held in acre prison. A Safed Arab delegation, headed by Mayor Wise, protested to the Assistant District Commissioner against the shooting.
While tension between Arab and Jew continued, the Shomer Hatzair, laborite Zionist youth organization, at a conference in Tel Aviv, adopted a resolution opposing the propose partition of Palestine and calling for peace with the Arabs. Allahab, weekly publication of Haj Amin el Husseini, exiled ex-Mufti of Jerusalem, was suspended for three months by the authorities.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
