On 22 July 1946 , Irgun attacked the British administrative headquarters for Palestine , which was housed in the southern wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem . A total of 91 people of various nationalities were killed and 46 were injured . The hotel was the site of the Secretariat of the Government of Palestine and the Headquarters of the British Armed Forces in Mandatory Palestine and Transjordan . The attack initially had the approval of the Haganah . It was conceived as a response to Operation Agatha ( a series of widespread raids , including one on the Jewish Agency , conducted by the British authorities ) and was the deadliest directed at the British during the Mandate era . It was characterized as one of the " most lethal terrorist incidents of the twentieth century . " The Jewish insurgency continued throughout the rest of 1946 and 1947 despite repressive efforts by the British military and Palestine Police Force to stop it . British efforts to mediate a negotiated solution with Jewish and Arab representatives also failed as the Jews were unwilling to accept any solution that did not involve a Jewish state and suggested a partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states , while the Arabs were adamant that a Jewish state in any part of Palestine was unacceptable and that the only solution was a unified Palestine under Arab rule . In February 1947 , the British referred the Palestine issue to the newly formed United Nations . On 15 May 1947 , the General Assembly of the United Nations resolved that the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine be created " to prepare for consideration at the next regular session of the Assembly a report on the question of Palestine . " In the Report of the Committee dated 3 September 1947 to the General Assembly , the majority of the Committee in Chapter VI proposed a plan to replace the British Mandate with " an independent Arab State , an independent Jewish State , and the City of Jerusalem ... the last to be under an International Trusteeship System . " Meanwhile , the Jewish insurgency continued and peaked in July 1947 , with a series of widespread guerrilla raids culminating in the sergeants affair . After three Irgun fighters had been sentenced to death for their role in the Acre Prison break , a May 1947 Irgun raid on Acre Prison in which 27 Irgun and Lehi militants were freed , the Irgun captured two British sergeants and held them hostage , threatening to kill them if the three men were executed . When the British carried out the executions , the Irgun responded by killing the two hostages and hanged their bodies from eucalyptus trees , booby-trapping one of them with a mine which injured a British officer as he cut the body down . The hangings caused widespread outrage in Britain and were a major factor in the consensus forming in Britain that it was time to evacuate Palestine . In September 1947 , the British cabinet decided that the Mandate was no longer tenable , and to evacuate Palestine . According to Colonial Secretary Arthur Creech Jones , four major factors led to the decision to evacuate Palestine : the inflexibility of Jewish and Arab negotiators who were unwilling to compromise on their core positions over the question of a Jewish state in Palestine , the economic pressure that stationing a large garrison in Palestine to deal with the Jewish insurgency and the possibility of a wider Jewish rebellion and the possibility of an Arab rebellion put on a British economy already strained by World War II , and the mounting criticism the government faced in failing to find a new policy for Palestine in place of the White Paper of 1939
attacked
King David Hotel bombing
Israel