During their mandate over Palestine the British hanged 108 terrorists between 1936 and 1939. Of these, 107 were Arabs and one, Shlomo Ben Yossef, 20, was Jewish.

Ben Yossef was one of three men who fired on an Arab bus in reprisal for Arab violence. None of the passengers was hurt.

The trio was tried by a military court in Haifa, charged with illegal possession of arms and with “intent to kill or cause other harm to a large number of people.” Under the emergency regulations both charges were capital offences.

Ben Yossef and Avraham Shein were sentenced to death. The third man was sent to a mental hospital. Shein’s sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment on account of his age, leaving only Ben Yossef to face the hangman on the morning of Wednesday, June 29th, 1938. On the wall of his death cell he had written in Hebrew: “Long live a free Israel!”