The massacre in Kibia [1] [2] ( Incident in Kibia [3] [4] or the Response operation in Kibia [5] [6] , the UN wording in the Russian translation: “Retaliatory operation - retaliation operation in Kibia” [7] [ 8] ) - an operation carried out on October 14, 1953 by a detachment of the Israeli army under the command of Ariel Sharon . The village of Kibiya was located near the Green Line in the territory occupied during the Arab-Israeli War of 1947-1949 and unilaterally annexed by Transjordan .
The operation followed a terrorist attack in the Israeli village of Yehud , in which a woman and two young children were killed and other family members were injured.
During the operation, 69 villagers were killed, including women and children. Most of them died during bombings by Israeli soldiers of houses in which civilians were located. According to a number of sources, they hoped to wait out the Israeli raid in the attics and in the cellars of the houses planned for destruction, and therefore were not found before the laying of explosives [9] [10] [11] .
Initially, the Israeli government tried to blame the raid on a group of armed Israeli settlers who allegedly acted without the knowledge of the Israeli government. The UN did not accept Israel’s arguments [12] [13] [14] and condemned its actions [7] . The attack was also condemned by the United States and other countries. As a result, the United States temporarily ceased aid to Israel [15] .
At the same time, the UN Security Council resolution noted the presence of strong evidence of “frequent acts of violence” against Israeli citizens committed from Jordanian territory [7] .
Content
Historical Background
In April 1949, a ceasefire agreement was signed between Transjordan [16] and Israel [17] . However, a large number of border incidents occurred between countries. There were frequent cases of unlawful crossing of the border from the Jordanian side by both civilians and terrorists (by Israeli definition) or Fedayins (by Arabic), who killed Israeli civilians and attacked military targets (police, border guards, soldiers [18] ), despite that the Agreement obliged the Jordanian authorities not to let terrorists or other infiltrants cross the border (Milstein [9] ).
The thousands of predominantly unarmed civilians and militants [19] who crossed the border were Palestinian refugees who were expelled or themselves left their homes during the 1948–49 Arab-Israeli war . Israel requisitioned their property and homes. Refugee attempts to return to the territory of Israel to their homes or to the Arab villages remaining in Israel were brutally suppressed by the Israeli authorities [20] .
A report by the chairman of the UN ceasefire monitoring commission in Palestine says that Jordan took serious preventive and punitive measures against border violators, both civilians and militants, during this period. [21] However, during a discussion of the operation in Kibia at the UN Security Council, the representative of Israel, Aba Eban ( Eng. ), did not agree with this assessment and gave numerous examples of violation [21] of the Jordan Armistice Agreement after the operation, from October 16 to November 11, 1953 . [18]
Although according to the Joint Armistice Monitoring Commission, from June 1949 to the end of 1952, 14 Israelis were killed by Jordanian actions, other sources claim that over the four years that have elapsed since its signing, terrorists leaked through the Jordanian border have died 124 Israelites [9] [11] [22] . According to data provided by the chief of the General Staff, Moshe Dayan , between 1949 and mid- 1954 there were an average of 1000 cases of penetration per month at several state borders, most of them on the Israeli-Jordanian border. Only at this border, 1069 clashes with armed marauders and 3573 cases of armed robbery occurred: “Livestock farming, crops, fertilizers, agricultural implements and irrigation pipes were one of the main objectives of this looting. Miles of telephone wires were stolen, and telephone poles destroyed [...] All this material damage, however, was compounded by terrible human victims. Only on the border with Jordan over the past four years, 513 Israelis were killed and wounded. ”
Dayan also noted that “many of these attacks did not take place on the“ border “, but deep inside the territory of Israel,” and “there were frequent cases when terrorists dragged wounded Israeli guards and border guards, brutally killed, and then their mutilated bodies presented as evidence of Israeli aggression against Jordan ” [14]
Israeli regular units also infiltrated Jordanian territory with retaliatory “retaliation operations,” in which civilians also died and were destroyed at home [23] . According to Israel, these actions were carried out against the settlements where the militants took refuge.
According to the Joint Armistice Monitoring Commission, from June 1949 until the end of 1952, 22 Jordanians died as a result of Israeli actions. [24]
According to the report of the Chief of Staff of the Joint Armistice Monitoring Commission to the UN Secretary-General dated October 30, 1952 , cited by M. Dayan [14] , an effective border demarcation system could not be established .. "because the leadership of Jordan did not want to agree with any" permanent “Marking line demarcation line." According to the same report, “an Israeli group that participated in the border marking (feasibility) survey was fired upon from territory controlled by Jordan,” resulting in “one of the crew members was seriously injured.”
The actions of both parties contradicted the Ceasefire Agreement [17] . According to a report by General Benikke, chairman of the UN ceasefire monitoring commission in Palestine, “the incident in Kibia, as well as the previous ones since January 1953, noted in his report above (paragraphs 13-17, in which Jordan was condemned by the commission , and Israel), should not be considered separately, but are the culmination of an increase in tension, local, or in general, between the two countries ” [23] .
Terrorist Act in Yehud Village
On the night of October 12-13, in the Israeli village of Yehud , located 10 kilometers from the Jordanian border, unidentified men threw a grenade at the Kanias family home. The explosion killed a woman and two young children, other family members were injured. Israel was shocked by this crime. The police immediately launched an investigation.
The police dog took the track, and, through UN mediation, the Jordanian side allowed the Israeli police to continue to search for the trail of the criminal with the help of the dog on the Jordanian side. However, a kilometer and a half after crossing the border, the track was lost by the dog. General Glabb , commander of the Jordanian Arab Legion, said he would do his best to track down the perpetrators of the grenade. [24]
Attack
However, on October 14, Israeli Defense Minister Lavon, after consulting with Israeli Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, ordered an “retaliation operation” in Jordanian territory. The Israeli command did not have accurate evidence that the terrorists entered Yehud precisely from Kibia, but (according to the book of the Israeli military historian Uri Milstein ), the government was for certain that Kibia was “one of the main terrorist bases” [10 ] [25] .
At the end of 1953 in Kibia there were about two thousand inhabitants - this was a large, according to Arabic notions, a village consisting of approximately three hundred houses. According to Milshtein, from the west he was covered by a Jordanian fortified point with a garrison of 30 people, reliably protected by barbed wire. An unpaved road crossed the village, branching on the outskirts with trails that led to neighboring villages; the terraces on which the olive plantations were located descended to a deep wadi stretching to the Israeli border - this was the main terrorist route to Israel [9] .
According to Milshtein, according to the plan of the operation, 20 soldiers under the command of Shlomo Baum were supposed to attack the old part of the village from the east, the other 20 - paratroopers under the command of Davidi - were to capture the new part and destroy the Jordanian post. Three branches of the Sharon group stood out for blocking the roads leading from Kibia, and a group of parachutists of 40 soldiers was entrusted with the main part of the operation - actually “retaliation”, that is, the undermining of Arab private houses. Significant reserve forces were to be on alert along the Israeli side of the border to help the detachment if the main forces of the Arab Legion entered the battle [9] [10] .
On October 14, 1953, 143 soldiers from Unit 101 and paratroopers arrived at the base in Ben Shemen . In the evening, trucks delivered them to their starting lines [9] [10] .
According to a statement by the representative of Jordan to the UN on November 16, 1953, about 300 to 600 soldiers participated in the attack, which began at 21:30 on the same day [21] (apparently, he took into account the reserve forces as well, see above [9] [ 10] ), a regular Israeli army. According to him, Kibiya was fired from mortars, and the roads leading to her were mined in order to impede the approach of the Jordanian army. The shelling of mortars was also subjected to the nearby town of Budrus. Then Israeli soldiers entered the city from three sides. They mined and demolished 42 houses and a school.
According to a report by General Benikke, chairman of the UN Truce Supervision Commission in Palestine [23] :
The bullet-riddled bodies near the doors and the numerous traces of bullets on the doors of the blown up houses indicate that residents were forced to stay inside the houses until these houses were blown up with them.
Original text21. 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.
According to the description of the attack of the Israeli historian Uri Milstein [9] :
A group of Shlomo Baum reached the starting point of the attack - the crossroads in front of the village - and burst into the eastern part of Kibia under erratic but strong fire from a Jordanian fortified post. Davidi's group launched an attack on this post. After some time, a general escape began in the village: hundreds of residents fled to the side of the neighboring village of Budrus, and the soldiers of the Gozni branch, who rode the path leading there to not allow Jordanian aid to Kibia, freely allowed the Arabs fleeing from Kibia. But the truck with Jordanian soldiers, who left Budrus on Kibia, was stopped and set on fire with bottles of combustible mixture. Jordanians fled; the soldiers of the Arab Legion also left their fortified posts; a few minutes later Kibiya was empty ... The Demoman set about their work.
The village seemed extinct ... Apparently, there was no one in the houses either: only in one of them the soldiers found a little girl forgotten by their parents, and in one of them - an old Arab man. The girl and the old man were sent to Budrus. However, there was no time for a thorough search, and he was not included in the plan of the operation. “We thought that all the inhabitants had been running for a long time,” one of the participants recalled. “We did not search the buildings, did not look either at the upper floors or in the cellar - we did not have a search order.”
The order was to raise the homes of the richest and most wealthy villagers into the air. Over the next two hours, the bombers destroyed forty-five such houses, after which the whole group left the village without hindrance and returned to the base at dawn. Sharon reported that the task was completed, the enemy’s losses were from 8 to 12 people killed, the detachment returned without losses.
Sharon's arithmetic was denied the very next morning, when Jordanian radio reported that 69 men, women, and children were killed during house demolitions in Kibiya. All of them, as it turned out, were hiding in the attics and in the cellars of the houses planned for destruction. These people did not vote, hoping to wait out the Israeli raid, and therefore were not found before the laying of explosives. Thus, what happened could be regarded as a tragic accident. But it was possible - and as a conscious destruction of the civilian population ...
...
Ben-Gurion summoned Sharon and questioned in detail about the operation. As Sharon says, in parting, the “Old Man” said: “It is not so important what others will say about us, it is important that the Arabs think of us, and from this point of view the operation was successful.”
Israeli historian Benny Morris [26] writes that the nature of the damage to the corpses testified to the inaccuracy of Sharon's allegations that the victims were hiding in their homes and were not found. According to Morris, Israeli soldiers moved from house to house firing through door and window openings. According to Jordanian pathologists, most people died from bullets and sharpenels, and not from explosions or crushing by collapsed buildings. According to Morris, the orders of the command of the units participating in the operation in Kibia clearly prescribed “destruction and the maximum possible number of killings” [27] .
As events later showed ( see Reaction ), the raid on Kibiya did not have the expected effect on Palestinian militants, and their sorties continued throughout the second half of the 50s, including the massacre of bus passengers on the road between Eilat and Tel Aviv , which occurred less than six months later, and known as the " Maale Akrabim massacre ."
Reaction
The action caused a sharp international condemnation. Ben-Gurion, despite the fact that the Minister of Foreign Affairs Chareth dissuaded him, decided to declare that the Israeli army was not involved in the attack, and write off his results on “independently acting settlers” [28] . In a speech on the radio, he stated:
The [Jewish] settlers on the Israeli border, who for the most part are refugees from Arab countries and people who survived Nazi concentration camps, have for years been the targets of (...) deadly attacks and have shown great restraint. They rightly demanded that the government protect their own lives, and the government of Israel supplied them with weapons and trained them so that they could protect themselves. But the armed forces of Transjordan did not stop their criminal activities until [people in some] border settlements lost their patience and, after killing a mother and two children in Ihud, they attacked the village of Kibiya, located on the other side of the border, which was one of the killer gang centers. Everyone regrets and suffers when blood is spilled anywhere and no one more than the Government of Israel regrets the fact of the death of innocent people during the act of retaliation in Kibia. However, all responsibility for this lies with the Transjordan government, which has endured for many years and thus encouraged predatory and deadly attacks by the armed forces from this country against Israeli citizens. [28] [29]
Moshe Dayan in his "Sinai diary" summed up the operation as follows [9] :
"The Arabs were convinced that Israel would not sit idly by ... The Israeli leadership realized that even in the case of the killing of our civilians, our retaliation operations should be directed only against the enemy’s military facilities ... Finally, Tsahal gained confidence ..."
On November 24, 1953, the UN Security Council, in resolution No. 101, condemned the actions of Israel. There was no mention of the terrorist attack in Yehud, but the resolution requested the governments of Israel and Jordan to strengthen measures to prevent acts of violence on both sides of the demarcation line [7] . However, in general, the situation remained relatively stable. The resolution was not given due attention, and skirmishes on the Israeli-Jordanian border were a common occurrence throughout the fifties, as were constant skirmishes in Jerusalem . [thirty]
Notes
- ↑ The term "Massacre at Kibia" in the literature - 464 at the request of qibya + massacre
- ↑ The term "Massacre in Kibia" in the literature - 189 at the request of kibya + massacre
- ↑ The term "Incident in Kibia" in the literature - 422 at the request of qibya + incident
- ↑ The term "Incident in Kibia" in the literature - 212 at the request of kibya + incident
- ↑ The term "Operation in Kibia" in the literature - 543 at the request of qibya + operation
- ↑ The term "Operation in Kibia" in the literature - 236 at the request of kibya + operation
- ↑ 1 2 3 4 101 (1953). Resolution of 24 November 1953 Archived April 2, 2015.
- ↑ UN Security Council Resolution 101, November 24, 1953
- ↑ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Uri Milstein DIVISION 101
- ↑ 1 2 3 4 5 Kapitonov Konstantin "DIVISION - 101"
- ↑ 1 2 50 years ago Ariel Sharon's “suicide team” destroyed 69 Palestinians in Kibia, October 14, 2003
- ↑ Benny Morris ( Benny Morris ). Righteous Victims. - Vintage books, 2001. - ISBN 978-0-679-74475-7 . p.279
- ↑ There is a temporary gap between the November 9, 1953 S / 635 / Rev.1 November 9, 1953 archived on February 8, 2015. at which the request of the representative of Israel A. Eban was adopted for a more detailed consideration at the next meeting of 12.11: Original text* 75. The PRESIDENT (translated from French): If understand him correctly, the representative of Israel is asking me to place him at the head of the list of speakers for the next meeting. Provided that no member of the Council wishes to speak before him, his request will be met.
- 77. If members of the Council have no objection the next meeting to consider the Qibya incident and related questions will be held next Thursday, November 12, at 3 pm
- It was so decided.
and the following available from November 16, 1953: S / 636 / Rev.1 November 16, 1953 Archived December 26, 2007.
From 1949 to the middle of 1954 there have been an average of 1,000 cases of infiltration per month along the several frontiers, the majority of them on the Israel-Jordan border. The number of clashes with armed marauders on the latter border alone abandoned during the last four years to 1,069, the incidents of theft, burglary and armed robbery to 3,573. Livestock, seed, fertilizers, agricultural implements and irrigation pipes have been among the principal booty of these marauding expeditions. Miles of telephone wires have been stolen and telephone poles destroyed, while the cutting of electric wires has seriously interfered with agricultural and industrial activities. All this material damage, however, is overshadowed by the fearful toll of human life. On the Jordan border alone 513 Israelis were killed and wounded during the past four years. ...
- October 16th. A group of armed raiders from Jordan attack a police patrol near Petah Tigva. They are pursued to the Jordan border.
- October 19th. Armed raiders from Jordan attempt to penetrate the village of Ramat Hakovesh. The attack is foiled. One infiltrator is killed when a hand grenade explodes in his pocket.
- October 20. Regular Jordan troops of the Arab Legion fire at a train near Bir Karshieh, south of Jerusalem.
- October 21st. Armed Jordanians trespass on Israel territory and open fire on a patrol near Bir Karshieh.
- October 22nd. Saboteurs from Jordan derail a locomotive and thirteen cars of the main Haifa-Tel Aviv train near Ayal. The mining was intended to explode a fuel train which ordinarily passes at that hour. The Mixed Armistice Commission condemns the Govern-ment of Jordan for this violation.
- October 24th. An Israeli police post in the Kakun area is fired upon from across the Jordan border. The same day Arab Legion -soldiers threaten to open fire on an Israel commander walking near the armistice line in the Ayal area where the train had been derailed.
- October 29th. An Israeli officer on his way to an Israeli-Jordan local commanders' meeting near Budrus is fired upon by Arab, Legion soldiers from across the border.
- October 30th. Armed Jordanians penetrate Neve Ilan, a village in the Jerusalem area. They open fire on the watchman and steal tools and other items from the villagers.
- 4 November. Jordanian national guardsman cross the armistice line into Israel near Attir in the northern Negeb. They seize three Israel shepherds and their flock of more than 350 head of cattle.
- 5 November. Armed Jordanians attack the railway station guard north of Hadera. They kill the railway signalman and take away the guard's weapons. An Israel patrol encounters armed infiltrators from Jordan who penetrate Israel in the neighborhood of Beit Guvrin.
- November 6th. An Israeli soldier is kidnapped and killed by Egyptian soldiers. Another Israel soldier is wounded but escapes. The body of the Israel soldier returned by the Egyptians is riddled with bullets fired from one meter range, and has cuts in the back and the stomach. The incident occurs when a three-man border patrol stops to exchange cigarettes and conversation with an Egyptian patrol.
- November 11th. Arab 14on troops attack a group of Israeli Arabs, women and children and a Jewish watchman 150 meters inside Israel territory near Sharafat. Eighteen women and children and the watchman are kidnapped and forced into Jordan territory. One woman is wounded and the watchman is later murdered.
...
- 126. ... Will the Jordan Govern-ment act through its armed forces to, prevent thousands of illegal crossings of this frontier? The answer is, No. The Jordan representative tells us quite candidly that the armed forces of Jordan will continue to dissociate themselves from any such responsibility and will leave the armistice frontier between Jordan and Israel in the custody of the local interests in whose care the frontier has been left up till now . The obvious result will be that this pattern - thousands of crossings with hundreds of murders and defensive measures will continue to exist.