The Qibya Massacre

After the 1949 armistice between Israel and its Arab neighbours there were frequent deadly incursions by one side or the other in to neighbouring territory and in the years after 1949 "Israeli forces killed thousands more Palestinians trying to return to their homes to reclaim lost property"

Speaking in 1956 Major-Genral Burns chief of the UN did not give a time scale but said that Israel “Had killed four Jordanians for every Israeli killed by Jordan troops”, he said that Israeli deaths had been largely “murders perpetrated by individuals” and described Israeli raids as “retaliatory”.

Attacks by the Israeli army were often described as “retaliatory” but this ignores the fact that Palestinians were attacking Israeli towns & villages in retaliation for being expelled from their homes and land and not being allowed to return.

The Scotsman newspaper in two articles published in October 1953 explains that the Jordan side of the border is “pockmarked with poor mountain villages in which 120,000 people - most of them refugees from the plains that now lie within Israel - scratch a hard living from the stony ground”. “Arab border inhabitants….are in many places cut off by the frontier from their lands” 

On 14th October 1953 the Israeli army’s Unit 101 headed by Ariel Sharon - Israels future prime minister - crossed the demarcation line between Israel & Jordan (now the West Bank) and carried out the Qibya massacre.

According to Brigadier Ashton, a British officer serving with the Arab Legion, the attack lasted five hours and was carried out with a “carefully laid mortar barrage to prevent [Jordanian] reinforcements [arriving]” By the end of the attack nearly 70 civilians had been killed, Sharon ordered his troops to inflict “maximal killing and damage to property”, houses were blown up with their inhabitants still inside and Israeli soldiers looted properties.

The Israeli attack was carried out by half a battalion of regular soldiers with mortars and machine guns, and after an investigation the Armistice Commission said that those killed were the victims of “cold-blooded murder”

The British government said the attack “constitutes the gravest violation so far of the terms of the Armistice agreement and will only endanger peace in the area” and that “there was no justification for the action of the Israeli armed forces” Israel has been told “to bring to justice those responsible and to compensate the victims”

The three foreign ministers from Britain, the US and France meeting in London said they “took a very serious view of the situation”

In the aftermath Israels Prime minister David Ben-Gurion lied by saying that Israeli soldiers were not involved  “Israel rejects with all vigour” he said “the absurd and fantastic allegation that 600 men of the Israel Defence Forces took part in the action against the village. It is clear beyond doubt that not a single army unit was absent from its place on the night of the attack on Qibya”. Instead he blamed Israelis living in the border region whose patience with attacks from Jordan had become exhausted describing it as a “reprisal raid”.

However a report by the UN Palestine Truth Commission said that “between 250 and 300 well trained Israeli soldiers carried out the recent attack at Qibya” mortar shells and other weaponry were consistent with those used by the Israeli army.