After making their way up the arduous mountain road to Ramallah, many of the displaced Palestinians find their way to the grounds of the Friends Schools. The Girls School comes to host some 200 displaced Palestinians, while the Boys School becomes an emergency hospital.
Traveling by car down the road from Ramallah to Lydda on July 13 looking for a staff member’s father who lived in Ramleh, Willard Jones and the staff member witness cars and trucks and thousands of people on foot struggling up the twenty-five-mile road from the towns of their expulsion to Ramallah.
Christina Jones writes in her diary for that day:
As they were coming back they came to a spot where a terrible accident had occurred; a truck full of refugees had collided with an Arab Legion armoured car speeding down to the plains, and people had spilled out of the truck, many receiving severe injuries. They were already bringing the injured to the hospital newly set-up in our building but hardly ready to meet such an emergency. It was midnight but I had fortunately stayed up, not knowing what we might be called on to do, and Willard said: “Better go up to the school building, they will need all the help they can get.” And they did, even my amateurish help. The two Egyptian doctors were called on to a tremendous night of bandaging and operating under incredibly difficult conditions. It was a dreadful night for us all as we worked into the small hours doing what we could to assist. In the midst of it all, I stood by the bedside of a young mother with a sweet baby by her side. She would not survive, but the baby would. I will never know how these young doctors got through the night, but they did a splendid job in a building which, as a hospital, could offer only space and water. Shelling went on most of the day in Jerusalem.
(Photo: Arab men, behind barbed wire fence, before being expelled. Ramle, 10 July 1948, in Wikipedia, by Benno Rothenberg /Meitar Collection / National Library of Israel / The Pritzker Family National Photography Collection)
Rabin Memoir Confirms Israel Expelled Palestinians of Ramle and Lydda
