Jewish Artillery Opens Counterfire in Jerusalem, Associated Press, San Francisco Chronicle, July 12, 1948.

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(The following is a pooled dispatch from American correspondents in Jerusalem.)

JERUSALEM, July 11 (AP)-It was officially announced today that Jewish artillery had opened a counter-battery fire against Arab guns which are mauling 100,000 besieged Jews in the Holy City.

An Egyptian Spitfire fighter plane added a new peril this morning by dropping two bombs on New Montefiore. (The New York Times said two planes dive bombed Jerusalem.)

The Israeli guns-“of various calibers, some British-made”-were concentrating on Egyptian artillery positions at the Monastery of Mar Elias, three miles south of Jerusalem on the Bethlehem road, and on Arab Legion gun posts in the vital suburb of Sheikh Jarrah which commands the Arab supply road to Nablus and the area of the Tomb of the Prophet.

Jewish gunners scored a direct hit on a Legion gun emplacement at Gordon’s Calvary-claimed by some to be the real scene of Christ’s final agony-which is on a hill 100 yards from the British Consulate.

Arab mortaring of the five-sixths of Jerusalem held by the Israelis continued today but on a somewhat reduced scale while the tempo of Jewish mortaring of the Old City mounted in intensity.

“Davidkas,” Jewish-built monster mortars which long were a secret weapon, were used in a systematic shelling of “specific areas where there are the largest Arab troop concentrations.”