page_title: 1947–1949 Palestine war
section_title: First truce: 11 June – 8 July 1948
hierarchical_section_title: 1947–1949 Palestine war / Course of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War / First truce: 11 June – 8 July 1948
caption_attribution_description: English: Hagana volunteers evacuating a man wounded in Egypt's bombardment of Tel Aviv during the War for Independence. עברית: מלחמת העצמאות. בצילום, חברי הגנה ומתנדבים מפנים פצוע שנפגע מהפגזות הצבא המצרי על העיר תל אביב.
context_page_description: The 1947–1949 Palestine war, known in Israel as the War of Independence and in Arabic as The Nakba, was fought in the territory of Palestine under the British Mandate. It is the first war of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the broader Arab–Israeli conflict. During this war, the British Empire withdrew from Mandate Palestine, which had been a province of the Ottoman Empire before British occupation in 1917. The war culminated in the establishment of the State of Israel by the Jews, and saw the complete demographic transformation of Palestine, with the displacement of around 700,000 Palestinian Arabs and the complete destruction of most of their villages, towns and cities. The Palestinian Arabs ended up stateless, displaced either to the Palestinian territories captured by Egypt and Jordan or to the surrounding Arab states; many of them, as well as their descendants, remain stateless and in refugee camps.
context_section_description: The UN declared a truce on 29 May, which began on 11 June and lasted 28 days. The ceasefire was overseen by UN mediator Folke Bernadotte and a team of UN Observers, army officers from Belgium, United States, Sweden and France. Bernadotte was voted in by the General Assembly to "assure the safety of the holy places, to safeguard the well being of the population, and to promote 'a peaceful adjustment of the future situation of Palestine'". He spoke of "peace by Christmas" but saw that the Arab world had continued to reject the existence of a Jewish state, whatever its borders.
  An arms embargo was declared with the intention that neither side would make gains from the truce. Neither side respected the truce; both found ways around the restrictions. Both the Israelis and the Arabs used this time to improve their positions, a direct violation of the terms of the ceasefire.
  "The Arabs violated the truce by reinforcing their lines with fresh units (including six companies of Sudanese regulars, Saudi battalion  and contingents from Yemen, Morocco ) and by preventing supplies from reaching isolated Israeli settlements; occasionally, they opened fire along the lines". The Israeli Defense Forces violated the truce by acquiring weapons from Czechoslovakia, improving training of forces, and reorganising the army. Yitzhak Rabin, an IDF commander who became Israel's fifth prime minister, said, "[w]ithout the arms from Czechoslovakia... it is very doubtful whether we would have been able to conduct the war". As well as violating the arms and personnel embargo, both sides sent fresh units to the front. Israel's army increased its manpower from approximately 30,000 or 35,000 men to almost 65,000 during the truce and its arms supply to "more than twenty-five thousand rifles, five thousand machine guns, and more than fifty million bullets".
  As the truce began, a British officer stationed in Haifa said the four-week-long truce "would certainly be exploited by the Jews to continue military training and reorganization while the Arabs would waste [them] feuding over the future divisions of the spoils". On 7 July, the day before the truce expired, Egyptian forces under General Muhammad Naguib renewed the war by attacking Negba.
caption: Volunteers evacuating a wounded man during Egyptian bombardment of Tel Aviv.
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