On the morning of June 28, 1914, in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, a Serbian student by the name of Gavrilo Princip shot and killed the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Duchess Sophie Von Hohenberg. These shots signaled the start of World War I (1914-1918) - as it was eventually called. It was a bloody juncture between the 19th and 20th centuries. It was the first industrial war to take place on all fronts - air, land and sea. A heavy price was paid - eight million dead, seventeen million wounded and entire regions destroyed. Europe after 1918 was a different Europe - exhausted, scarred and entering a phase of modernization. World War I is perceived as a modern war, not only because of its military tactics and innovative weaponry, but also because of the changes that occurred as a result of the war: the collapse of traditional empires - Germany, Austro-Hungary, Russia and the Ottomans - and the emergence of new national identities and borders. The fall of the Ottoman Empire set the scene for a new geo-political order in the Middle East. In the history of Eretz- Israel, World War I will be remembered as a dark period of starvation, expulsion and the use of the population as pawns in a confrontation between powerful nation-states. Historians generally relate to the military and political aspects of the war, presenting a linear narrative of the chain of events on the battlefield. The Ottoman Empire officially joined the war on the side of the Germans and the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of October 1914. On August 2, the Turks signed a secret agreement with the Germans for reciprocal military support against the Russians. The same day, a military call-up was announced for a general recruitment of soldiers, beginning in Turkey and then spreading throughout the entire Empire. On October 1, the privileges of foreign citizens living in Eretz Israel were revoked - an annulment of previous capitulation agreements. As a result, all foreign consulates and postal agencies in the country, including the offices of Turkey's allies, Austria and Germany, were closed. The old Jewish settlement saw the cancellation of these agreements as a scheme to sever their bond with Eretz-Israel, since their life there depended upon foreign citizenship granted by the European powers. The choice facing foreign citizens was to become Ottomans or leave the country.At the beginning of the war, some groups of settlers supported the Turkish war effort, going so far as to praise the annulment of the capitulation agreement; they believed that, as Jews who agreed to adopt Ottoman citizenship, they would receive better treatment from the governing authorities. At the close of 1914, the curtain rose on the war in Palestine, engaging the region in many parallel events in which 690,000 inhabitants were involved, including 85,000 Jews.