Haapalah / Aliyah Bet

On the morning of October 19, 1948, the naval battle at Majdal, the first in Operation Yoav, started as a routine patrol of the Israeli warship flotilla.
INS Wedgwood, INS Haganah and INS Noga moved south, and at 10:25AM, turned to move closer to Gaza.
At 11:00AM, INS Haganah spotted an Egyptian vessel.
At 11:21AM, INS Haganah confirmed that the Egyptian corvette unloading cargo.
At 12:03PM, INS Wedgwood and INS Haganah closed in on the shore, while INS Noga, armed only with 20 mm cannons, retreated due to insufficient armament.
At 12:38PM, the Egyptian corvette fired back, but missed, and the Israeli ships hit and damaged the corvette.
Egyptian aircraft began making bombing runs on the Israeli ships.
INS Haganah stayed near Majdal, while INS Wedgwood chased the corvette and avoided fire.
An Egyptian plane hit INS Haganah, and one crew member died, and four were wounded.
With her cannon damaged, INS Haganah retreated.
INS Wedgwood continued chasing the Egyptian corvette, while under fire from aircraft, her bow cannon was damaged, the corvette sped out of range.
IMS Wedgwood turned back.
At 13:40PM, Egyptian field cannons fired from shore, forcing both INS Haganah and INS Wedgwood to move out to sea.

At 21:10PM, October 21, 1048, five boats were launched from INS Maoz; two boats, manned by Yaakov Vardi and Zalman Abramov, were intended for the actual sabotage, one boat was a reserve, manned by Yochai Bin-Nun, and two boats, manned by Yitzhak Brockman and Yaakov Reitov, were launched to collect the commandos after the operation.
Zalman Abramov's boat attacked the Emir Farouk first, and Yaakov Vardi's boat, which was meant to strike at the minesweeper, mistakenly turned to attack the Emir Farouk as well.
The ship sank in five minutes.
Yochai Bin-Nun, in the reserve boat, noticed the mistake, and rammed the minesweeper; he was spotted and fired at, and jumped from his boat 40 meters short of the target. The minesweeper suffered significant damage, but did not sink and was hauled back to Alexandria.
The extraction boats collected the commandos, and by 23:10PM, all the commandos were back aboard INS Maoz.