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the officer Amin Izz al-Din and his aide Yunus Naffa, members of the Haifa garrison. The Haifa battles were the clearest example of “street warfare.” Both sides used modern weapons and explosives, and the Jews had built reinforced-concrete firing positions in the Halisa area to pick off Arab passersby and throw explosives at the neighboring Arab homes.

The British authorities, military and civilian, fully played their role in Haifa by supporting the Jews and attacking the Arabs. This forced Rashid al-Hajj Ibrahim, head of the National Committee, to send a letter to the secretary-general of the British Palestine government through the English district governor on 5 February 1948. He listed incidents in which British Army forces had favored the Jews and joined them in fighting the Arabs, entered Arab homes without warning, terrorized women and children, and surrounded neighborhoods on the pretext of searching for weapons. Among their vile methods, they would abduct Jewish individuals and leave them in Arab neighborhoods, making them liable to be killed. They would likewise abduct Arabs and throw them into Jewish neighborhoods for the Jews to attack them. Thus they intensified the fire.

Haifa witnessed four full months of fighting between Arabs and Jews. During that time the enemy achieved no superiority over the Arabs because of their remarkable steadfastness, despite the substantial military aid supplied to them by the British Army. British soldiers began setting up military roadblocks to prevent Arab reinforcements from coming from the west to areas exposed to Jewish shelling. The Arab neighborhoods thus became surrounded on all sides, and the Arabs in Haifa faced an unmistakable British-Jewish conspiracy. The British authorities then began withdrawing from government buildings of military value and handing them to the Jews, especially the post and telephone building overlooking Stanton Street, which they handed to the Haganah. Most Arab positions were thereby exposed and became targets for Jewish artillery fire.

On 21 April 1948, Major General Stockwell, commander of the British military division in northern Palestine, including Haifa, summoned several Arab officials to his headquarters on Mount Carmel. Among them were the officer Amin Izz al-Din, who had assumed command of the Haifa garrison after Commander Muhammad al-Hunayti was martyred, and his aide Yunus Naffa. He gave them a written statement in English concerning the successive clashes between Arabs and Jews, which had increased during the preceding two weeks, and the need to stop them to restore security and order. He said he did not want to involve the soldiers or police in