Jewish Delegation Investigates Destruction Cause by British Soldiers in Doroth

A delegation from the Jewish National Council of Palestine and the Small Zionist Actions Committee, headed by Chief Rabbi Ben Zion Usiel and Isaac Ben Zvi, president of the Council, today arrived at the Jewish settlement of Doroth which was occupied for six days by a large force of British troops searching for arms. The delegation will inspect the damage inflicted during the hunt and will report back to the Jewish institutions on the conduct of the British troops.

It was officially announced this evening that the search at Rukhama, a Jewish settlement neighboring on Doroth, ended today after seven days, and that all troops except a detachment of Royal Engineers had been evacuated. The head of the local council and the secretary of the settlement have been arrested.

The Hebrew press today published reports of the extensive destruction at Doroth and Rukhama. They revealed that no single room which was searched in the two communities was left intact. All floors and cellars were ripped up, sometimes to a depth of six feet, and walls and ceilings were knocked down.

Communal buildings and stores suffered most severely, the papers reported. A new meteorological station was reduced to a pile of rubble, the water reservoir is now unusable and a children’s nursery was flattened out by a bulldozer. Communal supplies of clothing have been cut in strips, business office machines such as typewriters and adding machines have been smashed. In addition the troops ripped up a flag brought from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp by a Palestine youth group.

Leaders of the Jewish cooperative movement in Palestine today cabled a protest against the “assaults” on the two cooperative settlements to the International Social Cooperative Movement. Pointing out that the raids upon Doroth and Rukhama destroyed “peaceful rural workers’ Kibbutzim” and deprived the settlers of defensive weapons, the cable asserts that this “assault carried out under the orders of the Labor Government contradicts the clear obligations of the Labor Party to the Jewish people.”