12:37 — The King David Hotel The Historical Record

The morning of July 22, 1946

This page sets out what the record shows about the bombing of the King David Hotel. It draws on British government records, the Irgun’s own accounts, the statements of the Jewish Agency and the Haganah, Palestinian sources and memoirs, and two histories built on the archives and on interviews.

Where the sources agree, the fact is stated plainly. Where they do not, each account is given under the name of whoever gave it, in its own words where possible. The small numbers lead to the sources at the foot of the page.

Before
The building
The King David was Jerusalem’s grand hotel and, from 1938, the centre of British rule in Palestine. In October of that year the British Army took the top floor for its headquarters. A month later the Government of Palestine took rooms in the south wing for its Secretariat. From 1939 the hotel was left with fewer than a third of its rooms. It stayed open to the public. Britons, Arabs and Jews worked in the building.16,17
June 291946
British forces carry out arrests and searches across Palestine. They enter the Jewish Agency’s offices in Jerusalem, search them and take documents away. About 2,700 people are detained: 2,675 in a figure put to the House of Commons, “more than 2,700” in Lapidot. The British name is Operation Agatha. In the Jewish community the day is called Black Sabbath, or Black Saturday.2,3,8,16
July 1
Moshe Sneh, head of the Haganah’s national command, writes to Menachem Begin, commander of the Irgun, and to Lehi, telling them to attack the hotel and a second target as soon as possible. At that time the Haganah, the Irgun and Lehi were acting together as the Hebrew Resistance Movement. According to Begin, the Haganah hoped the bombs would destroy papers taken from the Jewish Agency on June 29, which it believed were held in the hotel.8,16,17
July 17–22
The Haganah asks Begin to delay: through Israel Galili on July 17, and in notes from Sneh dated July 19, 20 and 22. Clarke prints the notes, and writes that the Jewish Agency committee with a veto over the Haganah’s actions had voted, three to two, to cancel the attack, and that Begin was told only to postpone it. Lapidot records a request to postpone and the note of July 19.8,16
July 22, 1946 · The morning
Around noon
A lorry pulls up at the hotel’s service entrance. Members of the Irgun disguised as Arabs hold the staff at gunpoint and carry milk churns into the basement.1,5,7,13 Hoffman puts the lorry’s arrival at about 11:45; the Royal Signals roll, just after midday; the Irgun’s poster of the next day, at 12:05.5,16,17 The United States Consul’s telegram that afternoon placed the whole attack between 12:20 and 12:40.13
In the basement
Seven churns are set beside the pillars of La Régence, in the hotel’s basement, under the south-west corner of the building. The Secretariat is directly above. The Irgun’s account gives fifty kilograms of explosive a churn and fuses set for thirty minutes. Hoffman gives about fifty pounds a churn.7,16,17
In the corridor
A British officer, Captain Alexander Mackintosh of the Royal Signals, comes upon the group. He struggles with them and is shot. He dies the next day.1,5,17 Clarke gives his rank as Major.16
12:15Police alarm
A member of the hotel staff, held at gunpoint, reaches an alarm button. It rings at the Mamillah Road police station, which sends a radio car.16,17
The escape
As the group leaves, military police open fire. Two Irgun members are wounded, and one of them dies. The Irgun’s account names him as Aharon Abramovitch.5,7
12:20Police log
A small bomb goes off in the street, in front of a shop across the road from the hotel. Passengers on a passing bus are injured. The police inspector on duty notes the time as exactly 12:20 and sounds the city’s sirens.16,17 The first official report, read to the House of Commons the next day, placed this bomb before the lorry arrived and said it “did virtually no damage”.1 What it was for is disputed.
The warningsTimes disputed
An Irgun courier, Adina Hay-Nissan, then sixteen, telephones warnings to the hotel switchboard, the nearby French Consulate and the Palestine Post. The Irgun’s own account speaks of two women and names neither. When the calls were made, and who was told, is disputed.7,16,17
About 12:32
The police sound the all-clear. Traffic moves again, and the guards reopen the door of the Secretariat.16,17
12:37
The bombs explode. The south-west corner of the hotel collapses: six floors of government and army offices.16,17
The days after
Army engineers work in shifts of sixteen hours. Survivors are still being reached the next morning. On the evening of July 24, sixty hours after the explosion, army doctors say no one else can be alive under the rubble.16
The count
On July 23 the Prime Minister gives the House of Commons 41 dead, 52 missing and 53 injured. On July 31 the Government’s figures in the House are 84 killed, 46 injured and 22 still missing.1,2 The final toll is ninety-one dead. Clarke dates the Government’s announcement of it to July 31.16,17
The Dead

Ninety-one people were killed. Clarke and Hoffman give the count as forty-one Arabs, twenty-eight Britons, seventeen Jews, two Armenians, a Russian, a Greek and an Egyptian.16,17 The Irgun’s account and the Institute for Palestine Studies give the same figures for the three largest groups.7,11 Arabs were the largest group among the dead.

Clarke counts 21 senior government officials, 13 soldiers, 3 policemen and 5 members of the public. The other 49 were clerks, typists and messengers, junior staff of the Secretariat, hotel employees and canteen workers.16 Hoffman gives sixteen senior officials, and a dozen women among the dead.17 The Institute for Palestine Studies describes the dead as “91 civil servants and civilian visitors”.11

Among those named in the sources: Atallah Mantoura, whom Clarke calls the Government’s second-ranking Arab civil servant; Hilda Azzam and Eugenie Markarian, typists in the Secretariat; Nadia Wahbe; Ibraheem Farraj; Julius Jacobs, the senior Jewish civil servant in Palestine, and Victor Levi, of the Financial Secretary’s office; the colonial officers Roderick Musgrave, Brian Gibbs, George Farley and Bernard Bourdillon; Company Serjeant Major Leonard Adams of the Royal Signals.5,12,16

The Government’s figures gave 53 injured on July 23 and 46 on July 31. Later accounts give more: 69 in Audeh, “nearly seventy” in Hoffman.1,2,12,17 The plaque placed at the hotel in 2006 gives ninety-two killed. That figure includes the Irgun member who died.17,18

What Is Disputed

The warnings

The Irgun, 1946
In posters put up in Tel Aviv on July 23, as Clarke prints them, the Irgun said: “The warnings by telephone were given between 12:10 and 12:15 so that the British had 22 minutes to evacuate the building and therefore the whole responsibility falls on the British”.16 Its statement to foreign correspondents, as the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported it, said: “The warning was given 27 minutes before the explosion was timed to go off.”6 In The Revolt Begin wrote of “twenty-five or twenty-seven minutes”.10,17
The Government of Palestine, 1946
The Government Information Office denied that any warning had been received by anyone in a position of authority. The police report put the warning to the hotel two minutes before the explosion, the call to the French Consulate five minutes after it, and the call to the Palestine Post after it as well.4,16 The Prime Minister’s statement to the House of Commons on July 23 does not mention a warning.1
Clarke, 1981
From interviews with the hotel’s staff, the Palestine Post’s operator and the caller, Clarke concludes that the first warning reached the hotel switchboard at least ten minutes before the explosion and the French Consulate at 12:27, and that the warnings were “received and then disregarded, not by Sir John Shaw but by Emile Soutter”, the hotel’s assistant manager, “and others”. He also records a hotel employee’s testimony that the manager telephoned the Army headquarters in the building and was told by a British officer, whom he did not name, not to evacuate; and a staff sergeant’s, that clerks on the Army floor were told to gather by the main staircase in case an evacuation was ordered.16
Hoffman, 2020
From British and American archives, Hoffman writes that the first call “appears to have been made to the hotel at 12:27”, and that the second was passed by the Palestine Post’s operator to the hotel switchboard at 12:32. He finds that word “was never passed to Shaw or any other person in authority in time”, that the Irgun’s claims of twenty-two to thirty minutes “have never been proven”, and that the same is true of British Army histories that put the warning a minute or less before the blast.17

The allegation against Sir John Shaw

Sir John Shaw was Chief Secretary of the Government of Palestine. Begin wrote that on the night of July 23 the Haganah’s Israel Galili told him that a senior British official, believed to be Shaw, had been brought the warning and had answered that he was there to give orders to the Jews, not to take them.10,16,17 The Irgun printed the claim in 1947.17 Shaw denied it, then and afterwards. He sued over a 1948 book that repeated it; the book was withdrawn and its publisher apologized.16,17 Hoffman dates the High Court’s decision in Shaw’s favour to April 1949.17 Clarke calls the story “a baseless rumor”. Hoffman finds that no warning reached Shaw.16,17

The Haganah’s part

The Irgun
Lapidot: the bombing “was carried out as part of the activities of the resistance movement, and on the explicit instructions of Moshe Sneh”.8
The Haganah, 1946
On July 23 the Haganah’s radio station, Kol Israel, announced, in the text Clarke gives: “the Hebrew Resistance Movement denounces the heavy toll of lives caused in the dissidents’ Operation at the King David Hotel.”16 A Haganah spokesman told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency by telephone that the explosion was not its work: “We never engage in such dastardly acts”.6
The histories
Clarke prints the letter of July 1 and the notes asking for delay, and writes that the Jewish Agency committee with a veto over the Haganah’s actions voted in mid-July to cancel the attack, a decision Begin was not told of.16 Hoffman writes that the Haganah “had both ordered and approved” it.17

The street bomb

The Irgun’s posters of July 23 called it “a little alarm bomb which could do no harm”, set off “so that the hotel could be evacuated in time”.16 Begin later said it was to “make a big noise and disperse the people”.17 The official British report said it was set off “presumably as a diversionary measure”.1 Clarke, citing the Irgun officer who planned the attack and the man who led it, writes that two street bombs were meant to close the road on either side of the hotel to troops and police, and that the second did not go off. He records that the first drew Secretariat staff to the windows above La Régence.16

What Was Said at the Time
The British Government · July 23
Clement Attlee, to the House of Commons: “By this insane act of terrorism 93 innocent people have been killed or are missing in the ruins.”1
The Irgun · July 23
“The tragedy which occurred at the Palestine Government offices was not caused by soldiers of the Irgun who carried out their duty courageously and with self-sacrifice. It was caused by the British themselves who disregarded a warning and refused to evacuate the building.”6
The Jewish Agency and the Jewish National Council · July 22
The two bodies “express their horror at the dastardly crime perpetrated by a gang of desperadoes who today attacked government offices in Jerusalem”.9
Arab Jerusalem · July 23 and the days after
Arab shops and cafés in Jerusalem closed on the afternoon of July 23, and as many as ten thousand mourners walked in the funeral processions. Funerals for the Arab dead went on at a rate of five a day through the week. At the gravesides, Clarke records, speakers called for vengeance and said that Arabs, not Britons, had been the bomb’s intended targets.16
Remembered later · Palestinian memoirs
Wasif Jawhariyyeh: “Jerusalem turned into a massive funeral.” Ghada Karmi: “There were funerals in Jerusalem for weeks afterwards, five or six a day”.12
After
July 22The Barker letter
Minutes after the explosion the British Army commander in Palestine, Lieutenant-General Sir Evelyn Barker, writes an order putting “all Jewish places of entertainment, cafes, restaurants, shops and private dwellings” out of bounds to his troops. It speaks of “punishing the Jews in a way the race dislikes as much as any, namely by striking at their pockets”.16 The letter becomes public within the week.14 On July 31 the Government tells the House of Commons that “the instructions given by the Commander were justified” but that it “must dissociate” itself “from the actual terms in which the letter is couched”.2
July 30to August 2
British forces place Tel Aviv under curfew and search the city house by house for four days.2,16 An official announcement during the search gives 1,100 arrests.15 Clarke gives eight hundred sent to detention camps when it ended.16
August
The Jewish Agency Executive meets in Paris. In Lapidot’s account it decided on August 5 to end the armed struggle against the British in Palestine. Clarke, who places the meeting a month after the explosion, writes that David Ben-Gurion ordered the Haganah to refrain from further attacks on British installations. The joint command with the Irgun and Lehi collapsed and was not re-formed. The Irgun and Lehi continued their attacks.8,16
1949
Sir John Shaw’s libel action in the High Court in London ends in his favour.17
2006
A plaque at the hotel, sponsored by the Jerusalem municipality, a preservation council and the association of Irgun veterans, is dedicated at the sixtieth anniversary. The British Ambassador and the Consul-General protest in writing to the Mayor, and the text is amended.17,18 As Hoffman transcribes the two versions, the first said: “For reasons known only to the British the hotel was not evacuated”. The second reads in part: “The hotel was not evacuated, and after 25 minutes, the bombs exploded. The entire western wing was destroyed and to the Irgun’s regret 92 persons were killed.”17
How This Page Uses Words

The page says “bombing” and “attack” in its own voice. Words such as “terrorism”, “outrage” and “operation” appear only inside quotation marks or as a name, as the words of those who used them. “Palestine” is the country’s name under the British Mandate in 1946. “Irgun” is the Irgun Zvai Leumi, also known as Etzel. The “Hebrew Resistance Movement” is also translated as the Jewish, or United, Resistance Movement. “Arab” follows the 1946 count; Palestinian sources describe the same people as Palestinians.

What this page could not check is left out or marked. It has no complete list of the ninety-one names. The 1946 statements of the Arab Higher Committee and the Arabic newspapers could not be read in the original. The police report of August 1946 and Begin’s memoir are cited through the historians who quote them.

The Series

12:37 is a drama. It keeps this timeline. The lives inside it are fictionalized. Certain characters and incidents have been composited, and dialogue has been created for dramatization. The series is not presented as a definitive historical record, nor does it assign moral verdicts.

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Sources British records Irgun, Haganah and Jewish Agency Arab and Palestinian Other contemporary reports Histories