THE WORLD ATLAS

War · November 1947 – 20 July 1949

1948 Arab–Israeli War

On 29 November 1947 the UN General Assembly voted to partition British-ruled Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, with Jerusalem under international control. Jewish leaders accepted the plan; Palestinian Arab leaders and the Arab states rejected it, and civil war broke out between Jewish and Palestinian Arab forces.

Israel declared independence on 14 May 1948 as the British Mandate ended, and the next day the armies of Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon, with a Saudi contingent, entered the country. Fighting alternated with UN truces until early 1949. Israel emerged in control of about 78 percent of former Mandatory Palestine; Transjordan held the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and Egypt the Gaza Strip, along armistice lines later called the Green Line. Israelis remember the war as their War of Independence. For Palestinians it is the Nakba ("catastrophe"): about 750,000 people fled or were expelled, over 400 villages were depopulated, and Israel did not allow the refugees to return.

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Dates
November 1947 – 20 July 1949
Casualties
An estimated 6,373 Israelis (about 4,000 soldiers and 2,400 civilians), 3,700–7,000 soldiers of the Arab armies and 3,000–13,000 Palestinian Arab fighters and civilians were killed.

The sides

Israel (Jewish forces before May 1948)

Palestinian Arab forces

Arab League states

Timeline of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War

  1. UN votes to partition Palestine; civil war breaks out

    Britain, which had ruled Palestine under a League of Nations mandate since the 1920s, handed the question of its future to the United Nations. On 29 November 1947 the General Assembly adopted Resolution 181, dividing the country into a Jewish state and an Arab state with Jerusalem under UN control. Jewish leaders accepted; Palestinian Arab leaders and the Arab states rejected it. Fighting between Jewish and Palestinian Arab militias began immediately and grew into a civil war while British troops prepared to leave.

  2. Operation Nachshon fights to open the road to Jerusalem

    By early 1948 Palestinian Arab irregulars had cut the road from the coast, leaving Jewish West Jerusalem short of food and arms. From 5 to 20 April the Haganah, the main Jewish militia, launched Operation Nachshon to open the route through the hills, its first brigade-sized offensive. The fighting around Castel, where the Palestinian commander Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni was killed, marked a shift from defence to attack under Plan Dalet, which aimed to secure the territory of the planned Jewish state and its approaches.

  3. Deir Yassin massacre

    On 9 April fighters of the Irgun and Lehi, right-wing Jewish militias, supported by the Haganah and Palmach, attacked the Arab village of Deir Yassin west of Jerusalem. At least 107 villagers, many of them women, children and elderly people, were killed; for decades a figure of about 254 was widely cited, but recent scholarship puts the toll near 110. News of the killings spread fear across Palestine and greatly accelerated the flight of Arab civilians from their homes.

  4. Hadassah medical convoy ambushed in Jerusalem

    Four days after Deir Yassin, Arab fighters ambushed a convoy carrying doctors, nurses, patients and Haganah escorts to the Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus, an isolated Jewish enclave in north-east Jerusalem. The vehicles were trapped and set alight in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood, and 78 Jews, most of them medical staff, were killed. The attack was described as a reprisal for Deir Yassin and showed how the civil war had become a cycle of attacks on civilians.

  5. Haganah captures Haifa; most Arab residents leave

    Haifa, a mixed port city of about 140,000 people, roughly half of them Arabs, was a key target as British forces withdrew. On 21–22 April the Haganah's Carmeli Brigade seized the city. Around 15,000 Arabs fled or were expelled during the fighting, and by mid-May only about 4,000 of some 65,000–70,000 Arab residents remained. Jaffa and other Arab towns fell in the following weeks, and the exodus became one of the central events of the Nakba.

  6. Kfar Etzion falls; massacre of defenders

    The Etzion bloc, four Jewish settlements between Bethlehem and Hebron, lay deep in territory allotted to the Arab state and had been besieged for months. On 13 May, the day before the Mandate ended, the Arab Legion and local Arab irregulars overran Kfar Etzion. Many of the defenders were killed after they had surrendered, and the other settlements of the bloc surrendered the next day. Israelis came to remember the massacre as one of the war's defining losses.

  7. Israel declares independence as the Mandate ends

    With the British Mandate due to expire at midnight, David Ben-Gurion read Israel's Declaration of Independence in Tel Aviv on the afternoon of 14 May 1948. The United States granted the new provisional government de facto recognition the same day, and the Soviet Union soon followed with full recognition. The declaration turned the civil war into an interstate war: Arab governments had announced that their armies would intervene once British rule ended.

  8. Arab armies enter Palestine

    On 15 May the armies of Egypt, Transjordan, Syria and Iraq crossed into former Mandatory Palestine, and Lebanon joined on the northern border; a Saudi formation fought under Egyptian command. Transjordan's Arab Legion moved mainly into areas allotted to the Arab state and around Jerusalem. Egyptian columns advanced up the coast towards Tel Aviv and through the Negev. Palestinians commemorate 15 May each year as Nakba Day, marking the loss of their homeland.

  9. Syrian attack on the Deganias is repulsed

    Syria's army advanced south of the Sea of Galilee and on 20 May attacked Degania Alef and Degania Bet, the oldest kibbutzim in the Jordan Valley. Defenders with few heavy weapons stopped the tanks at the perimeter, and by 21 May the Syrians had pulled back. The Syrian front then settled into a stalemate, with Syria holding small areas west of the old border until the armistice of July 1949.

  10. Israeli assault on Latrun fails

    The Arab Legion's hold on the police fort at Latrun again cut the main road to Jerusalem. On 24–25 May the newly formed Israel Defense Forces attacked it in Operation Bin Nun A, using units that included recently arrived immigrants, and were driven back with heavy losses; further attacks in late May and June also failed. Israel instead built a rough bypass, nicknamed the 'Burma Road', to supply West Jerusalem.

  11. Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City surrenders

    From mid-May the Arab Legion fought Jewish forces for control of Jerusalem. The Jewish Quarter of the walled Old City, held by a small garrison, was surrounded and shelled. On 28 May it surrendered; its residents were expelled to West Jerusalem and the defenders taken prisoner. Jerusalem was left divided, with Transjordan holding the Old City and East Jerusalem until 1967.

  12. Egyptian advance halted near Isdud

    Egypt's main column pushed up the coastal road and by 28 May reached a destroyed bridge north of the Arab town of Isdud (modern Ashdod), about 30 kilometres from Tel Aviv. From 29 May to 3 June Israeli forces counter-attacked in Operation Pleshet, using Israel's first fighter aircraft. The Egyptians dug in and advanced no further north, and the line held until the first truce.

  13. First UN truce begins

    The UN Security Council had demanded a ceasefire, and the Swedish diplomat Count Folke Bernadotte, appointed UN Mediator, negotiated a four-week truce that took effect on 11 June. Both sides used the pause to rearm despite an arms embargo; Israel received aircraft and weapons from Czechoslovakia and absorbed thousands of new recruits. When fighting resumed on 8 July, the military balance had shifted in Israel's favour.

  14. Lydda and Ramle captured; 50,000–70,000 residents expelled

    In the 'Ten Days' of fighting between the truces, Israel launched Operation Dani to secure the road from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Lydda was captured on 11 July and Ramle on 12 July, and hundreds of people were killed in Lydda. On 12 July Ben-Gurion authorised the expulsion of both towns' civilians, and some 50,000–70,000 people were forced to walk east towards Arab Legion lines in summer heat. It was the largest single expulsion of the war.

  15. Arab League sets up the All-Palestine Government in Gaza

    The second UN truce began on 18 July. In September the Arab League established an All-Palestine Government in Gaza, claiming authority over the whole of Palestine. It was led by figures close to the exiled Palestinian leader Amin al-Husseini but depended entirely on Egypt, which controlled the Gaza Strip. Transjordan's King Abdullah opposed it and moved to absorb the West Bank, which he annexed in 1950.

  16. UN Mediator Folke Bernadotte assassinated

    Bernadotte had proposed a settlement that would give the Negev to the Arab side and western Galilee to Israel, plans opposed by Israelis and Arabs alike. On 17 September members of Lehi, a militant Jewish group, ambushed his motorcade in Jerusalem's Katamon quarter, killing him and the French officer Colonel André Serot. Israel's government outlawed Lehi, but the killers were never convicted. The UN later handed his duties to a Conciliation Commission.

  17. Israel takes Beersheba in Operation Yoav

    On 15 October Israel broke the second truce with Operation Yoav, an offensive against Egyptian forces in the south. It cut the Egyptian lines, encircled an Egyptian brigade in the Faluja pocket, where it held out until the armistice, and on 21 October captured Beersheba, the main town of the Negev. Most of the town's Arab population had already fled. The operation opened the route to the southern Negev.

  18. Operation Hiram takes the Upper Galilee

    Starting on 24 October, Israeli forces attacked the Arab Liberation Army, a force of volunteers from Arab countries, and Syrian and Lebanese units in the Upper Galilee. Within about 60 hours the whole region was in Israeli hands, and Israeli troops briefly occupied villages inside southern Lebanon. Arab losses were estimated at 400 dead and 550 captured; killings of civilians were reported in several villages, and many inhabitants fled north into Lebanon.

  19. Operation Horev drives Egyptian forces from the Negev

    On 11 December the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 194, saying refugees wishing to return home and live in peace should be allowed to do so, or receive compensation. Days later, on 22 December, Israel launched Operation Horev to expel the Egyptian army from the Negev. Israeli columns crossed briefly into Egyptian Sinai before British pressure forced a withdrawal, and fighting near Rafah in early January 1949 led Egypt to accept armistice talks.

  20. Israel and Egypt sign an armistice at Rhodes

    Under UN mediator Ralph Bunche, Israeli and Egyptian delegates negotiated on the Greek island of Rhodes and signed the first armistice of the war on 24 February 1949. Egypt kept the Gaza Strip, crowded with refugees; the besieged brigade at Faluja was allowed to go home, and the village passed to Israel. Lebanon signed on 23 March and Transjordan on 3 April; Iraq withdrew its troops without a separate agreement.

  21. Israeli forces reach the Red Sea at Umm Rashrash

    In Operation Uvda, launched on 5 March, Israeli brigades raced south through the Negev, an area allotted to Israel under the partition plan but not yet occupied. On 10 March they reached the abandoned police post of Umm Rashrash on the Gulf of Aqaba and raised a hand-inked flag, a moment Israel regards as the end of the fighting. The site became the port of Eilat, giving Israel access to the Red Sea.

  22. Israel–Syria armistice ends the war

    The last armistice, with Syria, was signed on 20 July 1949 after months of talks on the Jordan River front; Syria withdrew from most of the land it held west of the border, which became demilitarised zones. The armistice lines, later called the Green Line, held until 1967. About 750,000 Palestinian refugees lived in camps in Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, and Israel barred their return. In the following years hundreds of thousands of Jews left or were expelled from Arab countries, many settling in Israel.

Related

Other wars of the time

Sources