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
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 attacked by militant Zionists.By the conclusion of the turbulent series of events in 1948, over half a million Palestinians had become refugees.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 United Nations first estimated their number at 711,000 in 1951.The circumstances which led directly to the involvement of the surrounding Arab states had formed by the end of the month; as armed Jewish groups took villages by force and expelled the Arab inhabitants, the latter fled en masse