Date October 12, 1953 Deaths 3 (2 children) | Attack type guerrilla attack Location Yehud, Israel | |
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Perpetrators 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.
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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, who were murdered in their sleep.
Israeli retaliation
Although the Commander of the Arab Legion (as the Jordanian Armed Forces were known at the time), Glubb Pasha, promised that Jordan would catch the perpetrators and bring them to justice, on the morning of October 13 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 the Yehud attack.
About 130 IDF soldiers participated in the reprisal codenamed Operation Shoshana (after the three-year-old girl killed in the Yehud attack), which was commanded by Ariel Sharon. 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.
The act was condemned by the U.S. State Department, the UN Security Council, and by Jewish communities worldwide. 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.