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By Fitzhugh Turner By Wireless to the Herald Tribune Copyright. 1948, New York Herald Tribune Inc.
JERUSALEM, Jan, 22.-Arabs today resumed their campaign to harass Jewish traffic between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, attacking at four places on the highway in the absence of British military patrols. Casualties were seven Jewish settlement police and a Haganah member killed, four Arabs dead in subsequent fighting and fifteen Arabs and seven Jews wounded.
Meanwhile, the press spokesman of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, Gershon Hirseh, complained that the mandate government appears to be guarding the northern borders inadequately against Arab infiltration. Haganah intelligence. he said, reports some 500 armed Lebanese nationals have entered Palestine in the last ten days to join Arab attacks on Jews. He charged that about 600 Syrians are in the country for the same purpose.
“We have the impression that government officials admit infiltration is going on, but that they find it difficult to keep the borders controlled,” Mr. Hirsch said.
An Arab source later said the Jewish figures were high. Lebanese, Syrians, Iraqi and Egyptian volunteers have come to Palestine, the Arab said, but their number for the present totals no more than a few hundred.
Whether “strangers” took part in the highway incidents was not known tonight, but Arabs here believed the attacks were directed at least by military leaders. Pending actual war against partition, part of the Arab program is to make it as difficult as possible, without unduly antagonizing the British, for Jews to supply Jewish Jerusalem.
The Jewish settlement police, riding in a Ford pick-up truck, were out on reconnaissance at 7 a. m. ahead of the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem passenger convoy when they were stopped at a makeshift roadblock in Yazur village, six miles from Tel Aviv. When four of them left the truck to remove the stones Arabs surrounded all seven, took their rifles and stabbed and beat them to death. The truck was burned and a military patrol found the bodies in a near-by orange grove.
The passenger convoy reached Yazur an hour after the attack, exchanging shots with the Arabs on the way through the village.
During the rest of the morning, Jews on that part of the highway attacked passing Arab trucks. In one case, police said, they fired sub-machine guns at a truck load of orange pickers, killing two men and a woman and wounding twelve among them five children.
A second Arab attack occurred about the same time seven miles from Jerusalem on a convoy of ten empty trucks headed for Tel Aviv. Snipers in the roadside hills killed a twenty-year-old Jew and injured two, one of them a Haganah girl of nineteen.
Mrs. Goldie Meyerson, head of the political department of the Jewish Agency, left by air for New York today to enlist support of American Jewry for the Jews of Palestine. An Agency spokesman said she will ask financial, political and moral aid.