Medjez-el-Bab is 60 kilometres west of Tunis. The Cemetery is situated 3 kilometres west of the town on the road to Le Kef (Route P5).

In May 1943, the war in North Africa came to an end in Tunisia with the defeat of the Axis powers by a combined Allied force. The campaign began on 8 November 1942, when Commonwealth and American troops made a series of landings in Algeria and Morocco. The Germans responded immediately by sending a force from Sicily to northern Tunisia, which checked the Allied advance east in early December. In the south, the Axis forces defeated at El Alamein withdrew into Tunisia along the coast through Libya, pursued by the Allied Eighth Army. By mid April 1943, the combined Axis force was hemmed into a small corner of north-eastern Tunisia and the Allies were grouped for their final offensive. Medjez-el-Bab was at the limit of the Allied advance in December 1942 and remained on the front line until the decisive Allied advances of April and May 1943.

There are 2903 Commonwealth servicemen of the Second World War buried or commemorated in Medjez-el-Bab War Cemetery. 385 of the burials are unidentified. Special memorials commemorate three soldiers buried in Tunis (Borgel) Cemetery and one in Youks-les-Bains Cemetery, whose graves are now lost. Within the cemetery stands the Medjez-el-Bab Memorial, bearing the names of almost 2000 men of the First Army who died during the operations in Algeria and Tunisia between 8 November 1942 and 19 February 1943, and those of the First and Eighth Armies who died in operations in the same areas between 20 February 1943 and 13 May 1943, and who have no known graves. The five World War I burials in Medjez-el-Bab War Cemetery were brought in from Tunis (Belvedere) Cemetery or Carthage (Basilica Karita) Cemetery in 1950.