[1] They were armed with non-standard weapons and tasked with carrying out retribution operations across the state's borders—in particular, establishing small unit maneuvers, activation and insertion tactics.

Many of these were small scale infiltrations that consisted of unarmed Palestinian refugees attempting to rejoin their families and of smugglers bringing in contraband for Israeli markets.

[4] These were later followed with attacks launched by refugees often motivated by economic reasons, but they were quickly adopted by the military of the neighboring Arab states, who organized them into semi-formal brigades which mounted larger scale operations from 1954 onwards.

[12] They were armed with non-standard weapons and tasked with carrying out special reprisals across the state's borders—mainly establishing small unit maneuvers, activation and insertion tactics that are utilized even today.

The recruits went on forced marches and undertook weapons and sabotage training at their base camp at Sataf, a depopulated Arab village just west of Jerusalem.

[3] Members of the unit were recruited exclusively from agricultural kibbutzim and moshavim, with the view that only those who were raised as farmers on the land had the spirit to defend it.

[19] The raid was heavily condemned by foreign observers, who called it "an appalling case of deliberate mass murder", and was publicly criticized in the Israeli cabinet by at least one minister.

[20] Two months later, in October, the unit was involved in the raid into the village of Qibya in the northern West Bank, then a part of Jordan.

[21][22] According to United Nations observers, bullet-riddled bodies near the doorways and multiple bullet hits on the doors of the demolished houses indicated that the inhabitants may have remained inside until their homes were blown up over them.

[3][12] Egyptian shock over the magnitude of their losses is often cited as one of the catalysts for the Soviet-Egyptian arms deal that opened the Middle East to the Soviet Union.

[12] This particular raid targeted a position of the Jordanian Arab Legion in one of the old British police forts, during which 18 Israeli soldiers and up to a hundred Legionnaires were killed.

During the end of the 1950s the IDF realized that they were lacking a small SF unit, since the T'zanhanim company had turned into an infantry brigade.

In various ways the Sayeret Matkal combined the operational experience gathered by Unit 101 and utilised the structure of the British Special Air Service.