The Qibya Massacre

 

The orders were utterly clear – Qibya was to be an example for everyone.

Excerpt from Ariel Sharon’s diary

 

The massacre that took place in Qibya, a village on the Arab West Bank, in October 1953, also became known as the ‘Qibya Raid’ or ‘Qibya Operation’. The massacre was a result of clashes between the borders almost directly after the signing of the armistice in 1949, which divided the new Jewish state of Israel from other parts of Mandate Palestine. Israel was being heavily infiltrated by a band of Palestinians, and it appeared that the Arab Legion in Jordan were either unwilling to curb the infiltration or unable to stop it.

 

Ariel Sharon

 

Ariel Sharon has always been a controversial figure, and for the majority of his career he fought for the maximum political rights for the Jews and the minimum for the Palestinians. His enemies described him as a leader with a dangerous obsession, believing that whatever action he took for his own cause was justifiable.

When Israel was formed Ariel Sharon was a platoon commander in the Alexandroni rigade. He was promoted to company commander in 1949 and finally in 1951 to intelligence officer. After a couple of years’ break, while he studied history and Middle Eastern Culture at the University of Jerusalem, he returned to active service under the rank of major. He became the leader of Israeli’s special forces unit, Unit 101. This Unit, under the encouragement of Sharon, carried out a series of raids against the Palestinians and neighbouring Arab states, which, it is claimed, was to improve the Israeli image and morale. However, this caused much bloodshed and in 1951, 137 Israelis, the majority of whom were civilians, were killed by Palestinian infiltrators. The following year the death toll was 162, and in 1953 a further 160 met their fate. On October 12, 1953, an innocent Jewish woman and her two children were killed by the infiltrators in the Israeli town of Yahud, and it was after this appalling attack that the Israeli government decided to retaliate.

 

Attack on Qibya

 

On the evening of October 14, 1953, a raid was carried out on the Jordanian village of Qibya. It started with an artillery barrage until the Israeli troops could get close enough to the village itself. They laid landmines on the approaching roads to prevent any Jordanian troops from joining in the action. When the Israelis received no further resistance from the village, they placed explosives directly outside many of the houses and, after warning the residents to leave their homes, they detonated their bombs. During a six-hour killing spree the troops murdered a total of 69 people, blew up more than 40 houses, a school, a water pumping station, a mosque, a police station and a telephone office. By dawn, considering their attack was complete, the Israeli troops withdrew with not one single casualty – the village of Qibya had been totally defenceless. The remainder of the population of Qibya, around 2,700 people, had evacuated under the instructions of Ariel Sharon’s forces.

When the rescue forces entered the village the following day, of the 42 bodies recovered, 38 of them were innocent women and children. One man, who had survived the massacre, had lost 11 members of the family. There was carnage everywhere, and bullet-ridden bodies lay near the doorways and inside the houses, which, despite the rumour that they had been warned to leave, proved that the inhabitants had been forced to stay inside their homes until they were blown up around them.

 

After the Massacre

 

After the appalling, and seemingly needless, massacre of Qibya, condemnation by the United Nations Security was swift in coming. On October 16 the UN issued a statement expressing the deepest sympathy for the victims of Qibya and telling the surviving population that they would do everything in the power to bring the perpetrators to justice.

Of course for many years the world has known who was responsible for the massacre and yet no legal action has ever been taken. In fact, Ariel Sharon, has rarely been criticized for giving instructions to his Unit 101 to destroy the village of Qibya, even though his orders categorically stated ‘destruction and maximum killing’.

Another appalling fact is that Qibya was not the only large-scale killing that was instigated by Sharon. Almost 30 years later, in 1982, he was the person who ordered the abhorrent atrocities that occurred at Sabra and Shatilla, the Southern Lebanon refugee camps. Here, the total of people killed were believed to have been between 800 and 3,000 civilians. The Palestinians described the action as ‘genocide’.

The reason for the attack was to route out the Lebanese Christian Phalangist militia, who the Israelis believed had avoided evacuation from Beirut by hiding among the refugees. They believed that there were possibly as many as 200 armed men in the camps with a generous stock of ammunition.

As soon as the scale of this massacre was published in the world press, with photographs of the refugee’s bodies having been brutally murdered, Israeli was held directly responsible. The Israeli public were appalled and a huge demonstration of around 300,000 people took place on September 25, 1982. They demanded for the immediate resignation of Prime Minister Menaheim Begin and Ariel Sharon and insisted on an immediate investigation of the tragedy.

In his autobiography, Ariel Sharon wrote that, although he deeply regretted the civilian casualties at Qibya,

 

. . . it was now clear that Israeli forces were again capable of finding and hitting targets far behind enemy lines.

 

Although Unit 101 was disbanded, it did, however, continue to take part in retaliatory action on military targets, but this time under the name of the 202nd Paratroop Brigade.

Even at the end of his career Ariel Sharon was still commanding ‘death squads’, and he has never been indicted for any of his crimes. Prime Minister Sharon suffered a brain haemorrhage on January 4, 2006, and Ehud Olmert took over as Acting Prime Minister.