JERUSALEM: Yossi Harel, the captain of the Exodus ship that tried to transport some 4,500 Holocaust survivors from Europe to British-ruled Palestine in 1947, has died at 90, his daughter said on Sunday.

“Our father was very sick, but we did not expect his death. He died of heart attack on Saturday,” Sharon Harel Cohen said.

Harel led clandestine maritime operations under the British mandate from 1945 until the creation of Israel in 1948, bringing in a total of four boatloads of some 24,000 immigrants. He was directly responsible for transporting one quarter of the Jewish refugees who managed to defy strict British-imposed limitations on immigration to the Holy Land in the years leading up to the 1948 war.

The Exodus ship, immortalised in a 1960 film directed by Otto Preminger and starring Paul Newman, set sail from southern France in July 1947 with the intention of breaking the British blockade.

The British refused to allow the ship to dock and forced refugees on to deportation boats back to Europe, although most were interned on Cyprus, then a British colony, and did not reach Israel until it declared statehood in 1948.

More than 50,000 Jews were held on the Mediterranean island after World War II in British internment camps after they were barred from Palestine. The incident sparked outrage in Europe and North America as the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps was coming to light after World War II.

Born in Jerusalem in 1918, Harel had joined the Hagana, a Jewish militia transformed into the Israeli army after the creation of the state in 1948, at the age of 15.—AFP