On 18 June 1946, hostages were abducted in Tel Aviv to pressure the British authorities, the first time this terrorist strategy was used.
--On 29 June 1946, the British mandate police force carried out a wave of arrests in the offices of the Jewish Agency. The Irgun gang, led by Menahem Begin, decided to retaliate by targeting the British army's HQ in Jerusalem, located in the King David Hotel, dynamiting it on July 22, 1946. As a result, 28 Britons, 17 Jews, 41 Palestinians and 5 others were killed, a total of 91 dead.
--On October 31, 1946, the British Embassy in Rome was bombed.
--On December 5, 1946, and for the first time, a car parked near some buildings in Sarafand was detonated.
--From June 4 to 6, 1947, twenty letter bombs were sent from Italy to British politicians in London.
--On July 29, 1947, members of that same gang kidnapped and killed some British soldiers in the Netanya region.
--But the most important operation carried out by Lehi was the assassination of Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte (1895-1948) who had been Vice-President of the Swedish Red Cross before being appointed by UN Secretary General, the Norwegian Trygve Halvdan Lie, as “mediator” in Palestine in May 1948. On September 17, 1948. Bernadotte actively sought to amend the map that partitioned Palestine in an attempt to reach a compromise between Arabs and Jews. This led the Lehi leadership to decide to assassinate him and four of its members, wearing Israeli army uniforms, blocked his car on September 17, 1948, in the Jerusalem sector controlled by Israel, and shot him along with French Colonel Andre Serot, head of the UN Observers in the city, who accompanied Bernadotte. Both men were killed instantly. To obscure the identity of the assassins, a movement called the “Patriotic Front” announced its responsibility but this did not succeed as a cover-up for the true assassins. Bernadotte's assassination was widely condemned, and a minute of silence was observed in his memory at the UN General Assembly then in session.
--On April 9, 1948, units from the Irgun and Lehi committed a massacre in the village of Dayr Yasin, with a population of some 700. More than a hundred of them were murdered in cold blood.
At a meeting of Haganah leaders in Tel Aviv in March, 1948, and with Ben-Gurion present, it was decided to draw up a comprehensive plan for ethnic cleansing, known as “Plan Dalet”, according to which numerous massacres were carried out to terrorize the Palestinian civilian population and to drive them out of their homeland. Some massacres were carried out before the creation of the Israeli army, as in the Tantura massacre, a village south of Haifa, on 22 and 23 May, 1948, which resulted in the killing of more than 200 Palestinian men and women. Others were committed after that army was formed, as in the village of al-Dawaymah in the al-Khalil (Hebron) district, on October 29, 1948, where hundreds of Palestinian men and women were killed.