page_title: Qibya massacre
section_title: The attack
hierarchical_section_title: Qibya massacre / The attack
caption_attribution_description: October 1953 - Inhabitants of Qibya coming back in their village after its attack by israeli forces.
context_page_description: The Qibya massacre occurred during "Operation Shoshana", a reprisal operation that occurred in October 1953 when Israeli troops under Ariel Sharon attacked the village of Qibya in the West Bank. At least sixty-nine Palestinian villagers were killed, two-thirds of them women and children. Forty-five houses, a school, and a mosque were destroyed. The attack followed cross-border raids from the Jordanian occupied West Bank and Israeli reprisals, in particular, the attack on Qibya was a response to the Yehud attack in which an Israeli woman and her two children were killed in their home.
  The act was condemned by the U.S. State Department, the UN Security Council, and by Jewish communities worldwide. The State Department described the raid as "shocking", and used the occasion to confirm publicly that economic aid to Israel had been suspended previously, for other non-compliance regarding the 1949 Armistice Agreements.
  The operation was codenamed Operation Shoshana by the Israel Defense Forces. It was carried out by two Israeli units at night: a paratroop company and Unit 101, a special forces unit of the IDF.
context_section_description: According to the Mixed Armistice Commission report, approved on the afternoon immediately following the operation, and delivered by Major General Vagn Bennike to the UN Security Council, the raid at Qibya took place on the evening of 14 October 1953 at around 9.30 pm, and was taken by roughly half a battalion strength of soldiers from the Israeli regular army. Later sources state the force consisted of 130 IDF troops of whom a third came from Unit 101. The American chairman of the Mixed Armistice Commission in his report to the UN Security Council estimated that between 250 and 300 Israeli soldiers were involved in the attack.
  The attack began with a mortar barrage on the village until Israeli forces reached the outskirts of the village. Israeli troops employed Bangalore torpedoes to breach the barbed-wire fences surrounding the village, and mined roads to prevent Jordanian forces from intervening. At the same time at least 25 mortar shells were fired into the neighbouring village of Budrus. The Israeli troops simultaneously entered the village from three sides. IDF soldiers encountered resistance from soldiers and village guards, and in the gunbattle that followed, 10–12 soldiers and guards defending the village were killed and an Israeli soldier was lightly wounded. The soldiers did not thoroughly inspect the homes in the village for the presence of residents, and when military engineers dynamited dozens of buildings across the village, scores of civilians were killed. At dawn, the operation was considered complete, and the Israelis returned home.
  Ariel Sharon, who led the attack, later wrote in his diary that he had received orders to inflict heavy damage on the Arab Legion forces in Qibya: 'The orders were utterly clear: Qibya was to be an example for everyone'. Original documents of the time showed that Sharon personally ordered his troops to achieve "maximal killing and damage to property", and post-operational reports speak of breaking into houses and clearing them with grenades and shooting. Sharon then later said that he had "thought the houses were empty" and that the unit had checked all houses before detonating the explosives. In his autobiography Warrior (1987) Sharon wrote:
  I couldn't believe my ears. As I went back over each step of the operation, I began to understand what must have happened. For years Israeli reprisal raids had never succeeded in doing more than blowing up a few outlying buildings, if that. Expecting the same, some Arab families must have stayed in their houses rather than running away. In those big stone houses [...] some could easily have hidden in the cellars and back rooms, keeping quiet when the paratroopers went in to check and yell out a warning. The result was this tragedy that had happened.
  UN observers noted that they observed bodies near doorways, and bullet marks on the doors of demolished houses, and later concluded that residents may have been forced to stay in their homes due to heavy fire.
caption: Palestinians returning to Qibya after the massacre
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