Original sentence: After the Israeli Declaration of Independence in May 1948, the fighting intensified further.By the end of the war hundreds of thousands of Arabs had fled or been expelled from areas controlled by Israel; in 1951 the United Nations gave the final estimate of their number as 711,000.Under this definition, the total number of Palestinian refugees is estimated to have grown form 914,000 in1950 to 4.9 million , one third of whom live in the West Bank and Gaza; slightly less than one third in Jordan; 17% in Syria and Lebanon (Bowker, 2003, p
Edited sentence: By May, Jaffa, Beisan, Safad and Acre were under Jewish occupation and towns such as Tiberias, traditionally home to amicable ethnic relations, were assaulted by militant Zionists.In August of 1947, as the remaining British forces prepared to evacuate, Haganah assumed autonomy and assaulted Arabs and their holdings—by January of the next year, what was to become a pattern of ethnic cleansing began as the village of Mansurat al-Khayt was raided and taken by Haganah.The circumstances which led directly to the involvement of the surrounding Arab states had formed by early May; as armed Jewish groups took villages by force and expelled the Arab inhabitants, the latter fled en masse.Under this definition, the total number of Palestinian refugees is estimated to have grown from 914,000 in1950 to 4.9 million , one third of whom live in the West Bank and Gaza; slightly less than one third in Jordan; 17% in Syria and Lebanon (Bowker, 2003, p.in 1951, the United Nations gave the final estimate of their number as 711,000