1952 raid on Beit Jala

The 1952 raid on Beit Jala was a part of the reprisal operations that were carried out by Israel in response to Arab fedayeen attacks from across the Green Line. It involved an Israeli incursion into Beit Jala, a town in the Jordanian-annexed West Bank (now a part of the Palestinian territories), on 6 January 1952, after which three houses were rigged with explosives and subsequently blown up; the attack killed seven civilian residents. After the attack, the perpetrators left leaflets at the site that were written in Arabic and explained the nature of the killings as a "penalty" for the earlier rape and murder of an Israeli Jewish girl by Palestinian Arab infiltrators, who were supposedly locals of Beit Jala, in the neighbourhood of Bayit VeGan in Jerusalem.