Berl Keren is a man of his word. In 1945, he and eight other Jewish underground fighters vowed not to reveal where they had hidden weapons from the then British rulers of Palestine.

The British mandate ended and the state of Israel was born in 1948. All of his comrades eventually passed away, but Mr Keren kept his word, refusing to say where the weapons cache lay beneath his Ein Hashofet kibbutz, south of Haifa.

"Three months ago, we told him, why not open it. So he agreed," Ishay Hubrman, a member of the collective community, told the Jerusalem Post. "It was very hard for him to agree, because for him it's (like) breaking (a) law." Even after the 97-year-old Mr Keren finally broke his vow, it took three months to find the exact location of the cache - underneath what was now the kibbutz gym.

When the digging finally began this week, the whole community gathered to see if the weapons were still there. Police sappers gently remove the arms, which included Sten submachine guns, Mauser rifles, bullets and ammunition clips, and photos of the carefully laid-out weapons were splashed across Israeli newspapers.