Bullet-riddled bodies near the doorways and multiple bullet hits on the doors of the demolished houses indicated that the inhabitants had been forced to remain inside until their homes were blown up over them

Witnesses were uniform in describing their experience as a night of horror, during which Israel soldiers moved about in their village blowing up buildings, firing into doorways and windows with automatic weapons and throwing hand grenades. A number of unexploded hand grenades, marked with Hebrew letters indicating recent Israel manufacture, and three bags of TNT were found in and about the village.- UN Security Council October 27th 1953

On October 14th 1953 Ariel Sharon led between 250 and 300 armed troops in the destruction of the villages of Qibya and Budrus.  69 civilians were murdered in their homes, 45 houses were demolished, a school and a mosque destroyed.

Noted Israeli historian Benny Morris has unearthed the order Sharon gave his troops: “maximal killing and damage to property.”[1]

And maximal killing is what Sharon and his commando unit brought to Qibya on the night of October 14, 1953. Their attack left 70 dead.

The Arab Legion investigated and determined that the Israelis had moved from house to house “systematically killing” the residents before blowing up their homes.[2] This account, Morris says, is corroborated by Israel Defense Forces post-operational reports, which describe breaking into most of the houses and “clearing them” with fire and grenades.[3]

A United Nations report suggests an even more grisly sequence: “Bullet-riddled bodies near the doorways and multiple bullet hits on the doors of the demolished houses,” the document says, “indicated that the inhabitants had been forced to remain inside until their homes were blown up over them.”[4]

Commander E.H. Hutchison, a U.S. naval officer serving on the U.N. armistice monitoring commission, investigated the slaughter. “Here and there from between the rocks,” he wrote, “you could see a tiny hand or foot protruding.”[5]

Every fall in Qibya during the olive harvesting season, the memory of the attack is kept alive in a mourning ceremony. A memorial plaque behind the village mosque honors Sharon’s victims.[6]

Sharon later claimed he thought the villagers had fled, leaving the houses empty.

This isn’t possible, historian Morris concludes. Rather, the Israeli troops “in moving through the village, had indiscriminately thrown grenades through windows, knocked down doors, and sprayed the interiors with automatic fire.”[7]

Maximal killing indeed.

Sharon later described his order for “maximal killing” as referring only to the Jordanian military then controlling the West Bank. “Of course, this is misleading nonsense,” is Morris’ retort. “The order was to kill as many Arabs as possible, without any discrimination between civilians, National Guardsmen, and soldiers.”[8]

Notes

1. Benny Morris, Israel’s Border Wars, 1949-1956, Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1993, p. 259. The Qibya affair is extensively discussed on pp. 257-276.
2. Morris, p. 261.
3. Morris, p. 262.
4. Morris, p. 261, note 91.
5. Morris, p. 261, note 91.
6. Flore de Préneuf, “An Eye for an Eye,” Salon.com, February 6, 2001.
7. Morris, p. 262.
8. Morris, p. 259, note 87.

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 October 14, 1953 at around 9.30 pm, and was taken by roughly half a battalion strength of soldiers from the Israeli regular army. It began with a mortar barrage on the village until Israeli troops reached the outskirts of the village, where Bangalore torpedoes were employed to breach defences. Landmines were laid out on roads to prevent Jordanian troops from joining the fight. At the same time at least 25 mortar shells were fired into the neighbouring village of Budrus. In the assault, simultaneously from three sides, forty-one dwellings were blown up, plus the village school

The international outcry caused by the operation required a formal reply by Israel. Intense discussions took place, and Moshe Sharett summed up, in his diary on 16 October, the opinion that:

Now the army wants to know how we (the Foreign Ministry) are going to explain the issue. In a joint meeting of army and foreign ministry officials Shmuel Bendor suggested that we say that the army had no part in the operation, but that the inhabitants of the border villages, infuriated by previous incidents and seeking revenge, operated on their own. Such a version will make us appear ridiculous: any child would say that this was a military operation. (16 October 1953)

Notwithstanding Sharett’s advice that broadcasting this version would make Israel appear patently ‘’ridiculous’’, on October 19, Ben-Gurion publicly asserted that the raid had been carried out by Israeli civilians.

None deplores it more than the Government of Israel, if … innocent blood was spilled … 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, he addressed the nation in the following terms:

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. Rightfully, they have demanded that their government protect their lives and the Israeli government gave them weapons and trained them to protect themselves.

But the armed forces from Transjordan did not stop their criminal acts, until [the people in] some of the border settlements lost their patience and after the murder of a mother and her two children in Yahud, they attacked, last week, the village of Kibya across the border, that was one of the main centers of the murderers’ gangs. Every one of us regrets and suffers when blood is shed anywhere and nobody regrets more than the Israeli government the fact that innocent people were killed in the retaliation act in Kibya. 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.

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