be peaceful or bloody. On 29 April, British commanders met with Ben-Gurion's son Amos and Jaffa mayor Yousef Haikal. An agreement was worked out, under which Operation Hametz would be stopped and the Haganah would not attack Jaffa until the end of the Mandate. The British dropped the demand for a complete withdrawal of Jewish forces from Menashiya, and only demanded control of the police station and road access to it. Rather than responding to the British demands, the Irgun blew up the police station as well as several houses, using the debris to block the very road that the British had demanded access to. Afterwards, the Irgun command declared that it was ready to hand over its positions in Menashiya to the Haganah. On 30 April, the fighting finally came to an end. Jaffa would eventually fall on May 13, when Haganah forces entered the city. Aftermath By 30 April there were about 15,000 to 25,000 people left in Jaffa. The Haganah had complete control of all access into and out of the town, with the exception of a British army 'presence' at Yazur. They were allowing people to leave the town but subject to searches for weapons. The British army was escorting civilians to Lydda and al-Ramle. David Ben-Gurion recorded in his diary that when he visited Salama on the evening of 30 April all he found was 'only one old blind woman.' Most of the villages were systematically levelled in the following weeks. The operation was the largest in the history of the Irgun. Because the Irgun had captured and held Menashiya on its own, just a few hundred meters from Jaffa, it was able to claim much of the credit for the later conquest of Jaffa. Arab communities captured during Operation Hametz See also Depopulated Palestinian locations in Israel References Bibliography Walid Khalidi, All That Remains, . Uses 1945 census for population figures. Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian refugee problem, 1947–1949, . Hametz Haganah April 1948 events in Asia