Operation Yiftach
palmach offensive
Operation Yiftach (Hebrew: מבצע יפתח, Mivtza Yiftah) was a Palmach offensive carried out between 28 April and 23 May 1948. The objectives were to capture Safed and to secure the eastern Galilee before the British Mandate ended on 14 May 1948. It was carried out by two Palmach battalions commanded by Yigal Allon.
Background
The Palmah defined the aim of Operation Yiftach as "the destruction of bases of the enemy ... and to destroy points of assembly for invading forces from the east [and] ... to join the lower and upper Galilee with a relatively wide and safe strip." Chaim Herzog viewed Operation Yiftach as part of Plan Dalet. Plan Dalet aimed at securing the areas allocated to the Jewish state in the UN partition plan before the end of the British Mandate in Palestine. Benny Morris, citing IDF and Haganah archival material, wrote that Plan Dalet had not been activated. He viewed some actions taken as piecemeal implementations of the plan, with commanders thinking they were handling particular local challenges in a non-orchestrated fashion. With the ending of the Mandate in sight, British forces had begun to withdraw from less strategic areas such as north-eastern Galilee.
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This entry incorporates text from “Operation Yiftach” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.