Yehud attack

Yehud attack

The attack site
Location Yehud, Israel
Date October 12, 1953
Attack type guerrilla attack
Deaths 3 (2 children)
Perpetrator(s) Palestinian Fedayeen squad

The Yehud attack was an attack on a civilian house in the village of Yehud carried out by a Palestinian Fedayeen squad on October 12, 1953. Three Jewish civilians were killed in the event.

Contents

The attack

On Monday, 12 October 1953, A Palestinian Fedayeen squad infiltrated into Israel from Jordan. The militants reached the Jewish village Yehud, located about 13 kilometers (8 mi) east of Tel Aviv, where they threw a grenade into a civilian house.

In the event a Jewish woman, Suzanne Kinyas, and her two children (3 year old girl and a 1 and a half year old boy) are killed.

The tracks of the perpetrators led to the Palestinian village of Rantis, then in the control of Jordan, located about five miles north of Qibya.

The attack shocked the Israeli public, both because of the fact that it was the first terror attack committed in the center of the Israel and because the victims of the attack were a woman and her infant children, whom were murdered in their sleep.

Israeli retaliation

Main article: Operation Shoshana

Although the Commander of the Jordan Legion, Glubb Pasha, promised that Jordan would catch the perpetrators and bring them to justice, on the morning of October 13th a decision was made by the Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, and the Chief of Staff Mordechai Maklef, deputy chief of staff Moshe Dayan and acting defense minister Pinhas Lavon, of retaliation in response to Yehud attack. The village of Qibya was chosen as a the destination for the counter attack.

About 130 IDF soldiers participated in the counter attack codenamed Operation Shoshana (after the three year old girl killed in the Yehud attack), which was commanded by Ariel Sharon. Then the IDF force arrived at the village of Qibya, threw grenades and fired through the windows and doors of the houses. Then blew up 45 houses, a school, and a mosque. About 60 civilians, mostly women and children, were killed in this Retribution operation.[1]

The act was condemned by the U.S. State Department, the UN Security Council, and by Jewish communities worldwide.[2] The State Department described the raid as "shocking", and used the occasion to confirm publicly that economic aid to Israel had been suspended previously, for other non-compliance regarding the 1949 Armistice Agreements.

References

  1. ^ Benny Morris, Israel's Border Wars, 1949-1956: Arab Infiltration, Israeli Retaliation and the Countdown to the Suez War, Oxford University Press, 1993, pp. 258-9.
  2. ^ Avi Shlaim (2001). The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World. W. W. Norton & Company. p. 91. ISBN 0393321126. Avi Shlaim writes: "The Qibya massacre unleashed against Israel a storm of international protest of unprecedented severity in the country's short history."

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