צה״ל ẒAHAL shelled the Altalena.

The 22 June diary describes the cabinet's decision and the firing. The archive's English translation corrects a reference to a naval gun to a field cannon. The 23 June naval account also says the ships did not fire on Tuesday afternoon and attributes the blaze to fire from shore. The records support shore artillery; they do not support the old article's attribution to ההגנה HAʾHAGANA or treating a translated mistaken weapon name as final evidence.^{1 2}

The cabinet vote and the subsequent firing are distinct acts. A vote authorizing action cannot establish the trajectory of every shell. The original artillery log, firing orders and ship damage investigation remain unexamined.

The memorial account gives sixteen deaths among הארגון HAʾIRGUN and three among צה״ל ẒAHAL for the affair. The National Library's reconstruction divides them between June 21 at כפר ויתקין KFAR VITKIN and June 22 at תל אביב TEL AVIV, assigning ten and one to the latter. A total of nineteen must not be presented as nineteen deaths from the shelling itself.^{3 4}

Neither count provides a checked roster of every victim's incident and death date. People who escaped into the sea, passengers who disembarked earlier and fighters killed ashore must remain distinct. The ship's cargo does not establish that every immigrant aboard was a combatant.

מנחם בגין MENAḤEM BEGIN's address of June 22, reproduced later by the heritage center, defended his account of prior agreement and opposed civil war. The address is evidence of his position, not independent confirmation of every prior promise. Its later publication must not move the speech onto July 16.⁵

Galnoor and Blander place the affair alongside later tests of the state's monopoly of force. Their formulation is explicit:

At base, all three revolved around the state’s exclusive prerogative to employ force.⁶

This interpretation makes state authority visible without dissolving responsibility for the people killed. The authors preserve disagreement about earlier understandings and discuss restraint that helped prevent the confrontation from becoming a wider civil war. TJD's inference is that the assertion of a single military authority and the tactical means used to enforce it must be evaluated as connected but independently evidenced questions.

The mediator's official account treated the weapons landing as one of three major truce violations. It did not absolve the government simply because its forces eventually acted against the ship. The passage also reports fire directed at an observer aircraft and denied access to observers, without establishing the perpetrator of every act.⁷

International supervision, immigration and sovereign command converged here. The precise sequence begins with The Altalena began unloading יהודים YEHUDIM., continues through צה״ל ẒAHAL and הארגון HAʾIRGUN fought at כפר ויתקין KFAR VITKIN. and ends in this destruction. Newspaper reports of curfew and cabinet crisis describe the aftermath rather than changing those occurrence dates.^{8 9}

The former article placed the shelling at 21 Sivan and condensed the whole affair into sixteen deaths. Both choices obscured the sequence. Correcting the public route to 15 Sivan restores the date supported by the diary while preserving the old identifier as a redirect. An existing rejected calendar check remains rejected pending human review; a corrected draft is not an approved date.

The public Ivrit route uses the standard Gregorian-to-Hebrew calendar conversion; the event evidence and sunset qualification follow. 22 June 1948 is the supported civil date. The daytime date is ט״ו בסיון ה׳תש״ח 15th 𝑜𝑓 Sivan, AM 5708; after local sunset it is ט״ז בסיון ה׳תש״ח 16th 𝑜𝑓 Sivan, AM 5708. The daytime shelling is supported by the dated diary and the following day’s naval retrospective. The former route 5708-03-21 is rejected; it does not represent this civil date. Begin’s nighttime address belongs to a later Hebrew boundary, and newspaper issues of June 24–25 report aftermath. ¹⁰

• How should sovereign military authority and the means used to enforce it be assessed together?
• Why does the whole affair’s memorial count differ from deaths in the Tel Aviv episode?