Thousands of British troops moved into the curfew zone and carried out house-to-house searches for weapons, while coming under intermittent attack from the IRA and rioters.

A week before the Falls Curfew, on Saturday 27 June 1970, there was severe rioting in Belfast following marches by the Protestant/unionist Orange Order.

The Provisional IRA presented itself as having successfully defended a vulnerable Catholic enclave from armed loyalist mobs.

[3][4][5] Meanwhile, the Official IRA arranged for a large number of weapons to be brought into the mainly nationalist and Catholic Lower Falls area for distribution.

[6] At about 4:30 pm on Friday, 3 July,[7] the RUC and British soldiers from the Royal Scots regiment entered the Lower Falls to carry out a weapons search.

The search lasted about 45 minutes and uncovered 15 pistols, a rifle, a submachine gun and a large quantity of ammunition.

[8] As the search ended and the troops began to leave, a crowd of youths on Raglan Street tried to block their path and pelted them with stones.

[9] Jim Sullivan, the local Official IRA commander, feared that the troops would launch a bigger raid and instructed his men to move weapons out of the area.

[6] Some householders set buckets filled with a mixture of water and vinegar outside their front doors "so that those involved in clashes could wet rags to protect them against the stinging gas".

[21] At 10 p.m. on Friday 3 July, four hours after the violence began, Freeland ordered that the area be put under an indefinite curfew and that anyone on the streets be arrested.

[25] Minutes after the curfew was announced, three soldiers were shot and wounded by Official IRA volunteers in Omar Street.

Soldiers pushed them back with CS gas and baton charges, but IRA snipers moved in and kept the base under intermittent fire.

[27] Inside the curfew zone, the British Army began a house-to-house search for weapons, demolished barricades and made arrests.

[8] Hundreds of houses were forcibly searched[6] and there were scores of complaints of soldiers hitting, threatening, insulting and humiliating residents.

[6] According to Mallie and Bishop's account: "The soldiers behaved with a new harshness... axeing down doors, ripping up floorboards, disembowelling chairs, sofas, beds, and smashing the garish plaster statues of the Madonna... which adorned the tiny front parlours".

[30] The British Minister of State for defence, Lord Balniel, defended the actions of the soldiers: "I am deeply impressed by the impartial way they are carrying out an extremely difficult task".

[11] At 5 pm on Saturday, the Army announced by loudspeaker that people could leave their homes for two hours to get vital supplies.

[31] During this time, the local Member of Parliament, Paddy Devlin, was arrested by the British Army while out talking to his constituents.

[9] The curfew was broken on Sunday when 3,000 women and children from the nationalist Andersonstown area marched to the British lines with food and other groceries for the people there.

[36] It was later reported that while the lower Falls was under curfew and the streets emptied of people, the British Army had driven two Ulster Unionist Party government ministers, John Brooke and William Long, through the area in armoured vehicles.

[34] This enraged nationalists, who perceived the gesture as a symbol of unionist triumphalism over an area subdued by British military force.

[41][42] Historian Richard English wrote that it was "arguably decisive in terms of worsening the relationship between the British Army and the Catholic working class".

According to Sinn Féin's Gerry Adams, "Thousands of people who had never been republicans now gave their active support to the IRA; others, who had never had any time for physical force, now regarded it as a practical necessity".

A truce was eventually agreed between them to prevent further bloodshed after the Officials assassinated a young Provisional named Charlie Hughes.