Israeli military commander Ariel Sharon and his Unit 101 special forces attacked the village of Qibya on the West Bank, destroying 45 buildings, killing 42 villagers, and wounding 15 others.

Ariel Sharon was an Israeli general and politician who served as the prime minister of Israel from March 2001 until April 2006.

Commando Unit 101 was a sayeret (commando) unit of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), founded and commanded by Ariel Sharon on orders from Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion in August 1953. They were armed with non-standard weapons and tasked with carrying out retribution operations across the state's borders—in particular, establishing small unit maneuvers, activation and insertion tactics.

The Qibya massacre occurred during Operation Shoshana, an Israeli so-called reprisal operation that occurred in October 1953, when IDF's Unit 101 led by future Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon attacked the village of Qibya in the West Bank, which was then under Jordanian control, and killed more than sixty-nine Palestinian civilians, two-thirds of whom were women and children.

Qibya is a Palestinian village in the West Bank, located 30 kilometers (19 mi) northwest of Ramallah and exactly north of the large Israeli city of Modi'in. It is part of the Ramallah and al-Bireh Governorate, and according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, it had a population of approximately 6,090 in 2017.

The West Bank is located on the western bank of the Jordan River and is the larger of the two Palestinian territories that make up the State of Palestine. A landlocked territory near the coast of the Mediterranean Sea in the Levant region of West Asia, it is bordered by Jordan and the Dead Sea to the east and by Israel to the south, west, and north. Since 1967, the territory has been under Israeli occupation, which has been regarded illegal under the law of the international community.