The Bombing of the King David Hotel

Shortly after noon on Monday July 22nd, 1946, a battered delivery truck was driven into the side entrance of the King David Hotel, just west of the old city of Jerusalem and headquarters of both Palestine’s civil administration and the British army in Palestine and Transjordan. Eight armed men dressed as Arab workers then forced their way into the hotel’s service bay. After overpowering and locking up the chief delivery clerk and the kitchen staff, they unloaded seven milk churns packed with 350 kilograms of TNT and gelignite from the truck and dragged them one by one along a long and narrow corridor to La Régence, the hotel’s basement bar directly underneath the civilian and the military headquarters in the south wing. As they did so, they were challenged by a British army officer, whom they shot and fatally injured. While some of the fake Arab workers acted as lookouts, others placed the milk churns next to two supporting columns in the basement bar and ignited their thirty-minute fuses.