Today in 1953, Unit 101 was established, for carrying out compensation operations.
In the first years after the establishment of the State of Israel, the IDF did not have effective security throughout its borders, and the young state suffered a large scale infiltration of terrorists. The defense establishment organized various units for operations against the infiltration, but in 1953, when the infiltration began to take on a more organized character, it was decided to establish a designated unit led by Ariel Sharon, commander of the Golani patrol. The first operation of the new unit took on a random character: Sharon gathered a few friends, and they crossed the border with machine guns to carry out a targeted killing against a known terrorist. Later, the unit became more institutionalized, and carried out reprisals in the villages where infiltrators came from, but never too institutionalized for Israel to admit that they were more than a “handful of armed civilians.” In October, the kibya operation was carried out, killing dozens of Jordanian civilians; this aroused international anger, and it was decided to merge Unit 101 into the 890th Battalion of the Paratroopers Brigade. However, Sharon and his friend Meir Har Zion (the “greatest Israeli fighter”) established a paratrooper patrol, in which they could continue to carry out intermittent reprisals until 1966.
Photo Source: Wikipedia
