Siege of Jaffa The Siege of Jaffa was fought from 3 to 7 March 1799 between France and the Ottoman Empire . The French were led by Napoleon Bonaparte , and they captured the city . Course . Jaffa was surrounded by high walls , flanked by towers . Ahmed al - Jazzar entrusted its defence to his elite troops , including 1 , 200 artillerymen . Napoleon had to win Jaffa before he could advance any further , and the whole expedition ' s success depended on its capture — the town was one of Syria ' s main mercantile centres , and had a harbour which would provide vital shelter for his fleet . All the exterior works could be besieged and a breach was feasible ; when Bonaparte sent a Turk to the city ' s commander to order its surrender , the commander decapitated the Turk and ordered a sortie . He was pushed back and as early as the evening of the same day ; the weight of the besiegers caused one of the towers to collapse and so , despite courageous resistance by its defenders , Jaffa was taken . According to some sources , the French messengers who brusquely told the city of Napoleon ' s ultimatum had been arrested , tortured , castrated and decapitated , and their heads impaled on the city walls . This harsh treatment led Napoleon , when the city fell , to allow his soldiers two days and nights of slaughter and rape . He also executed the Turkish governor Abdallah Bey . Bonaparte no longer wished to honour the promises of his adopted son Eugène de Beauharnais that prisoners ' lives would be spared and ordered that a large part of the Ottoman prisoners ( according to some sources around 2 , 440 , according to others 4 , 100 ) , many of them Albanians , be shot or stabbed to death with bayonets . Napoleon ' s eulogists later wrote of this decision : " For , to keep in submission so considerable a number of prisoners , it would have been necessary to detach guards for them , which would have severely diminished his army ' s numbers ; and if he had allowed them to leave free men , it was reasonable to fear that they might swell the ranks of Ahmed al - Jazzar ' s troops . " Aftermath . Napoleon also allowed hundreds of Egyptians to leave , hoping that the news they would carry of Jaffa ' s fall would intimidate the defenders of the other cities in Syria . This backfired , since their news instead made these defenders fight all the more fiercely . Meanwhile , a plague epidemic caused by poor hygiene in the French headquarters in Ramla decimated the local population and the French army alike . As he had also suggested during the siege of Acre , on the eve of the retreat from Syria - Palestine Napoleon suggested to his army doctors ( led by Desgenettes ) , that the seriously ill troops who could not be evacuated should be given a fatal dose of laudanum , but they forced him to give up the idea . Overcome in the north of the country by the Turks , Napoleon abandoned Palestine . After his departure the British , allied to the Turks and commanded by William Sidney Smith , rebuilt Jaffa ' s city walls . In the years 1800 to 1814 , after a new nine - month siege , Jaffa was again taken over by Napoleon ' s former opponent , Ahmed al - Jazzar , Acre ' s governor , a Bosnian .