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surrounded, with no option except to withdraw from the western side after some of our soldiers were martyred. The enemy directed some of its armored vehicles toward the Nahariya settlement and concentrated the rest on Napoleon’s Hill and the Haifa and Safed roads. Acre was thus in its grasp. He said that the city’s condition had become critical after Safed fell and Lieutenant Khalil al-Kallas, the former garrison commander, withdrew from Acre with his platoon. The Abu Mahmud al-Safuri unit had withdrawn before him as well. Their withdrawal left a large line around the city without guards. The people of Acre began speaking of the weakness of its garrison and the flight of its commander, Amin Izz al-Din. They even insulted us and tried to attack us as we passed through the villages, had Mr. Muhammad Mahmud al-Safuri’s victory and support for us not prevented it.

He said that, given the small number of soldiers fighting with him and their scant weapons, and the obstacles he had described, he saw no benefit in remaining in Acre. He feared another enemy attack on the city, now in the enemy’s grasp and surrounded on all sides, whose certain result would be the destruction of the remaining soldiers or their surrender alive to the enemy. Some of the garrison soldiers therefore withdrew by boat, while the larger group remained with him and withdrew overland to the Lebanese border. They reached Bint Jbeil on the evening of 14 May 1948, where they met Commander Amin Izz al-Din returning from Damascus.

Officer Amin Izz al-Din, who had been entrusted with Acre’s defense, had visited me at the Arab Higher Committee headquarters in Damascus and told me of Acre’s urgent need for weapons, ammunition, and fighting men, and its precarious situation. He told me how the Military Committee in Damascus had treated the matter lightly until he managed, with great difficulty, to receive 100 rifles. But this Committee, supervised by Field Marshal Taha al-Hashimi, told him that it was not responsible for operations. Amin Izz al-Din was therefore forced to wait in Damascus despite the danger in Acre while arranging the transfer of the rifles and ammunition. I told him that he could not wait while Acre was in the dangerous condition he knew, gave him the necessary amount from the Committee’s funds, and asked him to travel to Acre quickly. He left that night, but Acre had already fallen into the enemy’s hands.

During the battles of Acre and Haifa and the events then unfolding, Jewish bodies and the British authorities made attempts to conclude a truce between the Arabs and Jews in the two cities, to open the road between Haifa and Acre to Ras al-Naqura, the border point between Palestine and Lebanon