1948 Arab–Israeli War
| 1948 Arab–Israeli War | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Part of the 1948 Palestine war and the Arab–Israeli conflict | |||||||||
| |||||||||
| |||||||||
| Belligerents | |||||||||
| Commanders and leaders | |||||||||
|
David Ben-Gurion Yisrael Galili Yaakov Dori Yigael Yadin Mickey Marcus † Yigal Allon Yitzhak Rabin David Shaltiel Moshe Dayan Shimon Avidan Moshe Carmel Yitzhak Sadeh |
Azzam Pasha Farouk Ahmed Ali al-Mwawi Mohamed Naguib Abdallah I John Bagot Glubb Habis Majali Muzahim al-Pachachi Shukri al-Quwatli Amin al-Husseini Hasan Salama † Fawzi al-Qawuqji | ||||||||
| Strength | |||||||||
| 29,677 initially; later 117,500 |
10,000 initially; later 20,000 7,500–10,000 2,000 initially; later 15,000–18,000 2,500–5,000 1,000 800–1,200 (Egyptian command) 300 3,500–6,000 Total: 13,000 (initial) 51,100–63,500 | ||||||||
| Casualties and losses | |||||||||
|
6,373 killed (about 4,000 fighters and 2,400 civilians) |
Arab armies: 3,700–7,000 killed Palestinian Arabs: 3,000–13,000 killed (both fighters and civilians) | ||||||||
|
750,000+ Arabs flee or are expelled from Palestine forming the Palestinian diaspora Hundreds of thousands of Jews flee or are expelled from Arab countries, with over 260,000 in Israel by 1951. | |||||||||
The 1948 Arab–Israeli War (15 May 1948 – 10 March 1949), also known as the First Arab–Israeli War, followed the civil war in Mandatory Palestine (29 November 1947 – 14 May 1948) as the second and final stage of the 1948 Palestine war. The civil war became a war of separate states with the Israeli Declaration of Independence on 14 May 1948, the end of the British Mandate for Palestine at midnight, and the invasion by a military coalition of Arab states into the territory of Mandatory Palestine the following morning. The war formally ended with the 1949 Armistice Agreements which established the Green Line.
Since the 1917 Balfour Declaration and the 1920 creation of the British Mandate of Palestine, and in the context of Zionism and the mass migration of European Jews to Palestine, there had been tension and conflict between Arabs, Jews, and the British in Palestine. The conflict escalated into a civil war on 30 November 1947, the day after the United Nations adopted the Partition Plan for Palestine proposing to divide the territory into an Arab state, a Jewish state, and an internationally administered corpus separatum for the cities of Jerusalem and Bethlehem.
The civil war began with attacks by Arab militias and mobs on Jewish areas as a reaction to the UN Partition Plan vote. As the two communities battled, the British withdrew. In April 1948, Zionist forces launched an offensive codenamed Plan Dalet, during which they conquered and depopulated cities, villages, and territories in Mandatory Palestine in preparation for the establishment of a Jewish state. Just before the expiration of the British Mandate for Palestine, Zionist leaders announced the Israeli Declaration of Independence on 14 May 1948. The following morning, Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, and expeditionary forces from Iraq launched an invasion into Palestine, taking control of the Arab areas and attacking Israeli forces and settlements. The 10 months of fighting took place mostly on the territory of the British Mandate and in the Sinai Peninsula and southern Lebanon, interrupted by several truce periods.
By the end of the war, the State of Israel controlled about 78% of the former territory of Mandatory Palestine: all of the area that the UN had proposed for a Jewish state, as well as almost 60% of the area proposed for an Arab state, including Jaffa, Lydda and Ramle area, Upper Galilee, some parts of the Negev, the west coast as far as Gaza City, and a wide strip along the Tel Aviv–Jerusalem road. Israel also took control of West Jerusalem, which was meant to be part of an international zone for Jerusalem and its environs. Transjordan took control of East Jerusalem and what became known as the West Bank, annexing it the following year. The territory known today as the Gaza Strip was occupied by Egypt.
Expulsions of Palestinians, which had begun during the civil war, continued during the Arab-Israeli war. Hundreds of Palestinians were killed in multiple massacres, such as occurred in the expulsions from Lydda and Ramle. These events are known today as the Nakba (Arabic for "the catastrophe") and were the beginning of the Palestinian refugee problem. A similar number of Jews fled or were expelled from the surrounding Arab states in the three years following the war, 260,000 of which went to Israel.