Map of Syria, Palestine, Turkey, and Mesopotamia from the Baedeker 1912 travel guide Palestine and Syria with Routes through Mesopotamia and Babylonia and with the Island of Cyprus.
"On the morning of December 8th [1917] large numbers of the inhabitants, with the remaining religious chiefs, were personally warned by the police to be ready to leave at once. The extent to which the Turks were prepared to clear the city is shown by the fact that out of the Armenian community of 1,400 souls 300 received this notice. The tyrannical Djemal Pasha, when warned that vehicles were unavailable for the transport of the unhappy exiles to Shechem or Jericho, telegraphed curtly that they and theirs must walk. The fate of countless Armenians and many Greeks has shown that a population of all ages suddenly turned out to walk indefinite distances under Turkish escort is exposed to outrage and hardship which prove fatal to most of them; but the delay in telegraphing had saved the population, and the sun had risen for the last time on the Ottoman domination of Jerusalem, and the Turks' power to destroy faded with the day."
Excerpt from the account of 'an eye-witness within Jerusalem' of events in the city on December 8, 1917. After capturing the city of Gaza on November 6, in their third attempt, British forces had steadily progressed north through Palestine. During the war, Greeks and other ethnic and religious minorities of the Ottoman Empire had been roughly treated by government forces, but not with the genocidal frenzy unleashed on Turkish Armenians. Forced marches into hostile populations and the dessert were one of the government tools of genocide. The triumvirate of War Minister Enver Pasha, Minister of the Interior Mehmed Talaat, and Naval Minister Ahmed Djemal Pasha ruled Turkey and the Empire throughout the war. Talaat was the most implacable against the Armenians.
The Great Events of the Great War in Seven Volumes by Charles F. Horne, Vol. V, 1917, pp. 405–406, copyright © 1920 by The National Alumnia, publisher: The National Alumni, publication date: 1920
1917-12-08, 1917, 12, Ottoman Empire, Ottoman, Jerusalem
