A particularly vicious murder of a Jewish…
October 1953 CE
Jordan had condemned the murders and offered its cooperation to track down the criminals; the murderers had no known or suspected connection with Qibya.
Mr. Sharon's order, according to Israeli historian Avi Shlaim, was "to penetrate Qibya, blow up houses and inflict heavy casualties on its inhabitants."
Seven hundred regular Israeli troops participate in the attack, using mortars, machine guns, rifles and explosives.
Sharon and his Unit 101 during the night of October 14-15, 1953, kill ten to twelve soldiers or guards and destroy forty-two buildings—including the school and the village mosque—in Qibya, firing into doorways and windows with automatic weapons and throwing hand grenades.
Also killed, perhaps inadvertently, are sixty-nine civilian inhabitants, two-thirds of them women and children, who had been hiding inside their destroyed homes unbeknownst to the Israeli soldiers.
The attackers later turn their fire on the cattle, killing twenty-two cows. (In Warrior, Sharon's autobiography, he will later write that he found out about the unfortunate civilian casualties only the next day, listening to Jordanian radio.)
According to the UN observer on the scene two hours later, however, "One story was repeated time after time: the bullet splintered door, the body sprawled across the threshold, indicating that the inhabitants had been forced by heavy fire to stay inside until their homes were blown up over them." (Israel's foreign minister Moshe Sharett confides to his diary that the "stain" of the Qibya incident "would stick to us and not be washed away for many years.")
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