The three had been captured by the British during the Acre Prison break, tried, and convicted on charges of illegal possession of arms, and with 'intent to kill or cause other harm to a large number of people'.

[2][3][4] There is general consensus that the incident heavily contributed to Prime Minister Attlee's decision to permanently evacuate all British Forces until the end of the Jewish insurgency and the civil war between Jews and Arabs.

The first member of a Jewish underground group, Shlomo Ben-Yosef, was executed in 1938 for his part in an unsuccessful shooting attack on Arab civilians who were travelling on a bus.

Five days later two other prisoners, Meir Feinstein of Irgun and Moshe Barazani of Lehi, were scheduled to be hanged for, respectively, the bombing of a Jerusalem railway station in which a policeman was killed and the attempted assassination of a senior British officer.

While two of those arrested, Amnon Michaelov and Nachman Zitterbaum, were minors, and thus too young to be executed under British law, the other three, Avshalom Haviv, Yaakov Weiss and Meir Nakar, were not.

Several weeks earlier, Irgun had learned about a Jewish refugee from Vienna named Aaron Weinberg, who had fled to Palestine and was working as a clerk at a British military resort camp in north Netanya.

Weinberg, who was a SHAI agent, was entrusted by Bar-Ziv with striking up a relationship with two sergeants from the British Army Intelligence Corps, Clifford Martin and Mervyn Paice, who used to spend a lot of time in the camp.

On one of those visits, on the night of Saturday, 4 July, they were noted by an Irgun member sitting in the Gan Vered café who heard them speaking English and who followed them back to the camp.

Furthermore, Yosef Meller, a longtime Netanya resident and newly recruited Irgun member, volunteered to use his black taxi cab, which was well known around town, for the kidnapping.

[2] After being informed that his intended victims were there, Kaplan posted his men around the coffee shop and along the road leading north to the camp and waited for an opportunity to perform the abduction.

The decision was made in accordance with the Yishuv's position, which was published the next day, calling the kidnapping a provocation that might jeopardise what hope was left for clemency for the Irgun members condemned to death.

[5] Yehoshua Bar-Ziv, who had resigned as SHAI commander in Netanya in the meantime, provided his successor with information about a recently built underground bunker under the house of Irgun member Haim Banai in Ramat Tiomkin.

Local residents were kept under curfew, and Netanya became a virtual ghost town; its streets were empty save for patrolling British soldiers and armoured vehicles.

Ben-Gurion thought that a forced release, no matter by whom, would lead to the hanging of the condemned in Acre, and Irgun's finger would be pointed at the Agency, Haganah and SHAI.

Ben-Gurion was relying on this, plus Ben Ami's call to the Netanya residents "to leave no stone unturned"[11] to attract reprisals from Irgun if the hostages were rescued.

On 17 July, British MPs Richard Crossman and Maurice Edelman appealed for the release of the sergeants, as did other public figures and private citizens in Britain.

In the course of a meeting with Revisionist party member Yaakov Chinsky, Ben Ami told him that Haganah knew the kidnapped soldiers were being imprisoned under Banai's house.

Paglin then slipped out of the house and drove to Netanya in his car, where he collected four Irgun men; Benjamin Kaplan, Yoel Kimchi, Avraham Rubin, and Yosef Meller.

[5] In Netanya, they had observed that the streets were filled with British military vehicles patrolling the town, and as a result, they were in a rush to carry out the hangings quickly, lest they get caught in the act.

They hung the bodies from two adjacent trees and pinned notes to them which read: Two British spies held in underground captivity since July 12 have been tried after the completion of the investigations of their "criminal anti-Hebrew activities" on the following charges: Illegal entry into the Hebrew homeland.

Membership of a British criminal terrorist organisation known as the Army of Occupation which was responsible for the torture, murder, deportation, and denying the Hebrew people the right to live.

Their faces were heavily bandaged so it was impossible to distinguish their features... Their bodies were a dull black colour and blood had run down their chests which made it appear at first that they had been shot....

The RE [Royal Engineers] captain and CSM [company sergeant major] lopped branches off the tree which held the right hand body, and started to cut the hang rope with a saw.

The Yishuv's official institutions gave similar responses, condemning the perpetrators as murderers of two innocent persons, who took upon themselves the authority to decide in life and death issues.

On the evening of 31 July, groups of British policemen and soldiers went on the rampage in Tel Aviv, breaking the windows of shops and buses, overturning cars, stealing a taxi and assaulting members of the Jewish community.

On learning of the stonings, without waiting for orders, members of mobile police units temporarily based at the Citrus House security compound drove into Tel Aviv in six armoured vehicles.

Under the headline 'Murder in Palestine' The Times commented that: 'it is difficult to estimate the damage that will be done to the Jewish cause not only in this country but throughout the world by the cold-blooded murder of the two British soldiers....

Shaftesley's plea was ignored by some, and during the bank holiday weekend, which began on 1 August 1947, and throughout the following week, British Jews across the country felt the powerful impact of the incident, facing a sharp rise in hatred, abuse and ultimately rioting.

As he sentenced a rioter, Jack Piggott, to six months in prison for leading a mob and smashing the window of a Jewish-owned shop, one judge warned that there was "no excuse for these anti-Jewish demonstrations—they are both un-British and unpatriotic.

However, it was soon overshadowed by a new crisis over the Exodus, a Haganah-operated ship laden with 4,500 Jewish displaced persons, which set sail from France and was refused entry to Palestine, instead being sent back to Port-de-Bouc.