a and Beersheba. 800 soldiers of the Australian 4th and 12th Regiments of the 4th Light Horse Brigade under Brigadier General William Grant, with only horses and bayonets, charged the Turkish trenches, overran them and captured the wells of Beersheba in what has become known as the "last successful cavalry charge in British military history." On the edge of Beersheba's Old City is a Commonwealth cemetery containing the graves of Australian and British soldiers. The town also contains a memorial park dedicated to them.
During the period of the British Mandate for Palestine, Beersheba was a major administrative centre. The British constructed a railway between Rafah and Beersheba in October 1917; it opened to the public in May 1918, serving the Negev and settlements south of Mount Hebron. In 1928, at the beginning of the tension between the Jews and the Arabs over control of Palestine, and wide-scale rioting which left 133 Jews dead and 339 wounded, many Jews abandoned Beersheba, although some returned occasionally. After an Arab attack on a Jewish bus in 1936, which escalated into the 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine, the remaining Jews left.
State of Israel
The 1947 UN Partition Plan included Beersheba in the territory allotted to the proposed Arab state as the city's population of 4,000 was primarily Arab. The Egyptian army was stationed in Beersheba in May 1948.
During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion ordered the city conquered, calling for the "conquest of Beersheba, occupation of outposts around it, [and] demolition of most of the town." Israeli Air Force bombing raids began during the night of October 18/19, 1948. The Arab residents fled en masse the next day on foot and in buses. More bombing raids followed that night, and on October 21 at 4:00 in the morning, the 8th Brigade's 89th battalion and the Negev Brigade's 7th and 9th battalions moved in, some of the troops advancing from Mishmar
