 Most of the dead were staff of the hotel or Secretariat.The British responded to the bombing with Operation Shark, a cordon and search operation in which the entire city of Tel Aviv and the Jewish Quarter of Jaffa would be cordoned off and searched building by building and the entire Jewish population except for the elderly and children were to be screened.The British chose to search Tel Aviv due to faulty intelligence that the bombers had come from Tel Aviv, when in fact they had been based in Jerusalem.