EVACUATION TO EGYPT

Rotorua Morning Post, Issue 5324, 10 February 1947, Page 5

EVACUATION TO EGYPT

(Press Assn.—

SECURITY AREAS IN JERUSALEM

-Rec. 9.30 p.m.)

JERUSALEM, Feb. 9. The evacuation of British v. omen and children, also 11011essential civilians from Palesiine, has been completed. It is officially stated that a total of 1396 families of civilian anc Army personnel have been moved from Palestine to Egypt. Five hundred British officials in the new seeurity areas are getting used to the idea of living in a small hillet cut off from the rest of the world almost as completely as if it were an island in the middle of the ocean. Correspondents say that it is going to be a pretty tdrab existence for them, living in a part of Jerusalem only a mile long and half a mile wide, worlcing- in another small part of it, and never being able to go outside these two areas. TTiey won't be able to visit friends, and if they want to go to a cinema they have to go to the small local one in their zone instead of to one of the bigger ones in other pavts of the town.

A British correspondent who last right inspeeted the zone, a mile from the centre of Jerusalem, said that at check points soldiers stand guard in sandbagged emplacements. His commentary was that the British soldiers have been landed with yet another unpleasant j'ob. They don't hide their dislike of it, yet thev are quite cheer•ful. The Exchange Telegraph correspondent in Jerusalem says parties of .\ oung Jews left Jerusalem seeretly at midnight and by dawn they had erected barbed-wire barricades and watch-towers around the sites of three new settlements whieh they propose to build in the desert in the •Negeb area of Southern Palestine.