Day 26 of 599 of מלחמת העצמאות MILḤEMET HAʾAẒMAʾUT (War of Independence)

On 25 December 1947, דוד בן-גוריון DAVID BEN-GURION recorded that gunfire had cut off location://BatYam and endangered its road connection to location://Holon. He discussed a roughly two-kilometer path over sand dunes and an estimate of £1,200. The diary shows institutional action on behalf of households of יהודים YEHUDIM and transport; it does not establish that the road was complete. ¹

The archive’s English translation gives his assessment of the immediate road problem:

Bat Yam is cut off and surrounded by gunfire.²

The sentence is a leader’s contemporary assessment of access, not a measured duration of siege or a completed road inventory.

A fuller source study of this episode is available at A new road was planned to protect access to location://BatYam..

Fighting in location://Haifa intensified around 25–26 December 1947. A JTA dispatch dated 26 December describes a major battle, Arab casualties and British action against armed groups. The report is a contemporary account of several confrontations, not an incident register that assigns each death to a precise hour or street. ³

Gunfire reached homes as well as combat positions. An AP report separately records a woman from the community of יהודים YEHUDIM killed while hanging laundry. Her death is not a generic battle statistic and has its own companion. The combined reports support that יהודים YEHUDIM living there faced danger and that British troops intervened; they do not prove a single coordinated command behind every shot.

This is Day 26 of the 599-day civil-date series: 1947-12-25. Its OTD route, 5708-10-12, is the daytime fixed-Hebrew conversion of that civil date, not a claim that every action mentioned here occurred before sunset.⁴ The adjacent Hebrew date after local sunset is 13 Tevet 5708 (5708-10-13). Ben-Gurion's diary dates the planning conversation to civil 25 December and an instruction to begin work to 26 December. The discussion hour is unknown, so 12 Tevet is a provisional daytime conversion. The later Haifa dispatch covers multiple locations and hours, not a single verified casualty count for 25 December. Newspaper issue dates, dispatch dates and later testimony are kept distinct from occurrence dates.

• Which event or report fixes the date of this day’s main account?
• What record would resolve the most important remaining timing or casualty question?