ineffectiveness of armed resistance and the incompetence of their leaders. According to Morris, during the exodus of Haifa "The Haganah broadcasts called on the populace to 'evacuate the women, the children and the old immediately, and send them to a safe haven.'" They didn't call for Arab flight, but the broadcasts "were designed to cause demoralisation—and the HGS\Operations proposed to 'exploit' this demoralisation (it didn't say how)." Intimidation Yoav Gelber considers that the "Haganah, IZL and LHI's retaliations terrified the Arabs and hastened the flight." According to Pappé, the Haganah engaged in what it called "violent reconnaissance", in which "[s]pecial units of the Haganah would enter villages looking for 'infiltrators' ... and distribute leaflets warning the people against cooperating with the Arab Liberation Army. Any resistance to such an incursion usually ended with the Jewish troops firing at random and killing several villagers." Khalidi mentions "repeated and merciless raids against sleeping villages carried out in conformity with plan C", i.e. in the period before April 1948. Various authors give examples of instigation of whisper campaigns. Childers cites the fact that rumours were spread by the Israeli forces that they possessed the atomic bomb. Morris cites Yigal Allon, the Palmach commander, describing such a campaign: "I gathered the Jewish mukhtars, who had ties with the different Arab villages, and I asked them to whisper in the ears of several Arabs that giant Jewish reinforcements had reached the Galilee and were about to clean out the villages of the Hula, [and] to advise them, as friends, to flee while they could. And the rumour spread throughout the Hula that the time had come to flee. The flight encompassed tens of thousands. The stratagem fully achieved its objective." Shelling of civilians and fighters Khalidi illustrates the psychological warfare of the Haganah by the use of the Davidka mortar. He writes that it was a "favorite weapon of the Zionists", which they used against civilians: "the Davidka tossed a shell containing 60 lbs. of TNT usually into crowded built-up civilian quarters where the noise and blast maddened women and children into a frenzy of fear and panic." Various authors mention specific cases in which the Yishuv engaged in shelling of civilians: Morris says that during the battle of Tiberias the Haganah engaged in bombarding the Arab population with mortars Morris says that during the exodus of Haifa a primary aim of mortar barrages was