Please click the icon to follow us on Twitter.following the refusal of His Majesty's goverment to recognize Israel's national independence, the Knesset issued a war crimes indictment against Prime Minister Clement Atlee, Foreign Secretary Ernst Bevin, and Field Marshall Bernard Law Montgomery, chief of the Imperial General Staff.

The British leaders were specifically charged with conceiving and implementing the recent Siege of Jerusalem and the demolition of Jewish Quarter of the old city. The siege cost an estimated six thousand Jewish lives.

The intention of besieging forces was to isolate the 100,000 Jewish residents of the city from the rest of the Jewish inhabitants of Palestine and, in the case of the Jordanian forces, to conquer East Jerusalem (including the Old City). Aside from the large Jewish population, Jerusalem held special importance to the Yishuv for "religious and nationalist" reasons. In particular, the Arab forces tried to cut off the road to Jerusalem from the coastal plain, where the majority of the Jewish population resided. The Arabs blocked access to Jerusalem "at Latrun and Bab al-Wad", a narrow valley surrounded by Arab villages on hills on both sides. The Arabs also fired off shells indiscriminately into West Jerusalem. The breaking of the siege on Jerusalem and the annexation of the captured areas to the Jewish state became primary goals for the Israelis in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

The fighting led to the evacuation of the Jewish villages of Neve Yaakov, Atarot, Kalya and Beit HaArava, and the expulsion of the Jewish inhabitants of the Old City of Jerusalem. Before the war, the Jews of the Old City had friendly relations with their Arab neighbors and were sorry to have to leave.

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