1954–55 incidents 1956 incidents The Qibya massacre occurred during Operation Shoshana, an Israeli so-called reprisal operation that occurred in October 1953, when IDF's Unit 101 led by future Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon attacked the village of Qibya in the West Bank, which was then under Jordanian control, and killed more than sixty-nine Palestinian civilians, two-thirds of whom were women and children.

[6] 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.

[7] Half of Jordan's prison population at the time consisted of people arrested for attempting to return to, or illegally enter, Israeli territory, but the number of complaints filed by Israel over infiltrations from the West Bank show a considerable reduction, from 233 in the first nine months of 1952, to 172 for the same period in 1953, immediately before the attack.

[8] The Israeli government immediately claimed that the killings were perpetrated by Palestinian infiltrators, a charge queried by Jordanian officials, who were skeptical, and who offered to collaborate with Israel in order to apprehend the guilty parties, whoever and wherever they were.

Moshe Sharett said later that "the Commander of the Jordan Legion, Glubb Pasha, had asked for police bloodhounds to cross over from Israel to track down the Yahud attackers".

The United Nations observer team's investigation failed to find any evidence indicating who committed the crime, and the Jordanian delegate to the Mixed Commission condemned the act in strong language on 14 October.

[14][15] The Chief of Staff of the Arab Legion in Amman flew to Jerusalem to ask that no retaliatory actions take place that might compromise Jordanian investigations underway on their side of the border.

[11] According to the former Time correspondent to Jerusalem, Donald Neff: "Force had to be used to demonstrate to the Arabs that Israel was in the Middle East to stay, Ben Gurion believed, and to that end he felt strongly that his retaliatory policy had to be continued.

[1][17] 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.

Israeli troops employed Bangalore torpedoes to breach the barbed-wire fences surrounding the village, and mined roads to prevent Jordanian forces from intervening.

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.

The U.S. State Department issued a bulletin on 18 October 1953, expressing its "deepest sympathy for the families of those who lost their lives" in Qibya as well as the conviction that those responsible "should be brought to account and that effective measures should be taken to prevent such incidents in the future.

The Government of Israel rejects with all vigor the absurd and fantastic allegation that 600 men of the IDF took part in the action ... We have carried out a searching investigation and it is clear beyond doubt that not a single army unit was absent from its base on the night of the attack on Qibya.

(Statement by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, ISA FM 2435/5)On Israeli Radio that same day, Ben-Gurion addressed the nation, repeating the accusation that the massacre had been perpetrated by Israeli civilians: The [Jewish] border settlers in Israel, mostly refugees, people from Arab countries and survivors from the Nazi concentration camps, have, for years, been the target of (...) murderous attacks and had shown a great restraint.

But all the responsibility rests with the government of Transjordan that for many years tolerated and thus encouraged attacks of murder and robbery by armed powers in its country against the citizens of Israel.

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.Uri Avnery, founder and editor of the magazine HaOlam HaZeh, relates that he had both his hands broken when he was ambushed for criticizing the massacre at Qibya in his newspaper.

[30] According to Daniel Byman, the attack, "controversial, brutal, and bloody – worked," leading Jordan to arrest more than a thousand fedayeen and stepped up its patrolling of the border.