Terrorist Jews Execute 4 in Arab Family; Arabs Attack Jews in Bus, NY Herald Tribune, Nov. 21, 1947.

By Fitzhugh Turner By Wireless to the Herald Tribune Copyright, 1947, New York Herald Tribune Inc.

RAANANA, Palestine, Nov. 20.-A group of Jewish terrorists entered an Arab farmhouse in an orange grove near here before dawn today, aroused a dozen sleeping occupants and selected five men, whom they marched outside to a wire fence by a roadside. There the Jews opened fire with sub-machine guns, killing four of the Arabs and critically wounding the fifth.

The Arabs were members of a farming family-the Shubaki, who have lived for years in peace with Jewish neighbors of the American-founded orange growing colony of Raanana, not far north of Tel Aviv. The attackers were believed by Raanana citizens to be terrorists from “outside,” members of the Stern group, who presumably blamed one of the family for informing to the British.

This belief was based on the fact that Shubaki farm, one of the few Arab properties in the neighborhood, is within sight of the farmhouse used until last week by the Stern group as an arms training center. British soldiers surrounded the building eight days and killed five young Sternists. In retaliation against the British in the following few days the Stern group killed ten British -four civilians three soldiers and three police. The death toll in the series of incidents thus stood at nineteen.

Seven or eight Jews took part in the Shubaki killings. According to one survivor they were led by a man wearing a stolen police uniform, his followers being in khaki with berets. Several transient Bedouin Arab families are camped in the neighborhood, and the terrorists went first to a Bedouin tent to ask the way to the house.

Inside the building they asked for the five farmers by name-Ahmed Salami Shubaki, fifty; his two sons and two nephews, aged twenty to thirty. They ordered the women and children of the family to remain inside, took the men out and shot them down. The terrorists departed on foot, and Bedouin men, hearing the gunfire, investigated in the dark and found the bodies.

The shootings were the first since August involving Arabs and although there were no signs of it tonight people on both sides feared they might bring an attack by Arabs on Jews somewhere in the country to avenge the Arab deaths.