The Government has completed arrangements for martial law and has asked the Jewish Agency for Palestine if it will agree to its proclamation, it was learned today.
The Agency was understood to have replied that it opposed such measures in principle but would not oppose martial law in certain districts if the Government thought it necessary.
One Jewish watchman was gravely wounded and another less seriously injured when police shot them by mistake in attempting to rout Arab snipers at a Jewish grove in a Tel Aviv suburb.
The watchmen, Schmuel Hirschberg and Israel Ben Yehuda were taken to Hadassah hospital at Tel Aviv. They had been guarding the grove when Arabs opened fire on them and fled. Police rushed to the scene and shot the watchmen, mistaking them for Arabs.
Hirschberg’s condition was graver tonight. The official version of the shooting was that Hirschberg and Ben Yehuda were shot by police patrols when they ignored an order not to run away.
RAILWAY BRIDGE BLOWN UP
Earlier, a railway train on the Haifa-Tel Aviv line narrowly escaped derailment at Hedera when the conductor noticed in time that a section of the track had been removed. A railway bridge between Haifa and Lydda was blown up.
Government forces dispersed a demonstration that occurred in Jaffa when Ibrahim el Shanti, Arab youth leader and publisher of the Arab daily, El Adifaa, was exiled to a concentration camp in the Sinai desert.
The right-wing Hebrew newspaper, Hayarden, appeared with its front page blank because the Government censor had not permitted publication of the texts of addresses delivered by Rabbi Uziel and Moshe A. Amiel, chief rabbi of Tel Aviv, at “Blue-White” Day at the Levant Fair earlier in the week.
Fifty tons of wheat were destroyed by fire at Hedera. The Hebrew daily, Haaretz, reported that two cases of dynamite of a quantity of ammunition stolen from the Government arsenal near Jerusalem yesterday were recovered, and that five more cases of dynamite in addition to seven sacks of gunpowder were still missing.
One of two Arabs arrested in connection with the murder of three Jews as they left the Edison Cinema the night of May 16 was sentenced to nine months in jail for possession of arms. The second was acquitted.
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.
