The Six-Day War: How Six Days in June 1967 Rewrote the Middle East
When most people picture the Six-Day War, they see the famous photograph of Israeli paratroopers at the Western Wall — or maybe archive footage of burning Egyptian tanks in the Sinai Desert. Neither image is wrong, but both arrive at the very end of a story that starts with a false Soviet intelligence report, moves through the closure of a shipping strait, and passes through some of the most decisive air and ground combat of the twentieth century before it gets anywhere near that photograph. This is that longer story.
By BookOfWorldHistory·June 7, 2026·History·14 min read · 2,680 words
Originally published at: https://www.bookofworldhistory.com/blog/six-day-war-1967-israel-egypt-jordan-syria-complete-history
When most people picture the Six-Day War, they see the famous photograph of Israeli paratroopers at the Western Wall — or maybe archive footage of burning Egyptian tanks in the Sinai Desert. Neither image is wrong, but both arrive at the very end of a story that starts with a false Soviet intelligence report, moves through the closure of a shipping strait, and passes through some of the most decisive air and ground combat of the twentieth century before it gets anywhere near that photograph. This is that longer story.
There's a photograph taken on June 7, 1967, that ended up on walls and magazine covers and documentary posters for decades afterward. Three Israeli paratroopers stand at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. One of them is crying. The stones behind them dwarf everything — the men, the moment, the cameras. Their faces don't look like victory. They look like people who've just witnessed something they weren't entirely sure they'd ever actually see.
The Six-Day War produced a lot of photographs like that.
Between June 5 and June 10, 1967, Israel fought simultaneously on three separate fronts against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. It destroyed the Egyptian Air Force in the first few hours of the first day. Within six days, Israel had taken the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria. The word decisive gets overused in military history writing. There really is no other word for this one — it was among the most one-sided outcomes of the twentieth century, achieved in less time than most people spend planning a summer holiday.
How it happened is worth knowing carefully. The reasons for it are still being argued about.
David Rubinger's photograph of three Israeli paratroopers — Zion Karasenti, Yitzhak Yifat, and Haim Oshri — at the Western Wall hours after its capture became one of the defining images of the twentieth century. None of their faces look like men who've just won something.
The Months Before the Shooting Started
The Six-Day War didn't arrive without warning. By the spring of 1967, anyone paying close attention to the Middle East could see things moving toward something bad.
Egypt and Israel had been sitting in a cold, unresolved tension since 1956, when Israel invaded the Sinai Peninsula in response to Egypt's closure of the Straits of Tiran — the narrow passage giving Israel access to Eilat, its southern port on the Red Sea. That crisis was papered over by stationing United Nations peacekeepers along the Egyptian-Israeli border, and for roughly a decade, those peacekeepers kept the temperature down.
In May 1967, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser received intelligence reports — false ones, fed to him by the Soviet Union — claiming Israel was massing troops on the Syrian border. What followed was a sequence of escalations that each seemed justifiable on its own and together built toward a war that, looked at from the outside, appeared almost engineered.
Nasser moved roughly 100,000 Egyptian troops into defensive positions in the Sinai. Then he expelled the UN peacekeepers. Then, on May 22, he announced that the Straits of Tiran were closed to Israeli shipping.
That third move was the tripwire. Israel had said explicitly since 1957 that closing the Straits would be treated as an act of war. Nasser knew this. His calculation — that Egypt was strong enough to force Israel to back down, or that Soviet backing and Arab solidarity would neutralize any Israeli response — turned out to be wrong in nearly every particular.
Jordan and Egypt signed a defense pact on May 30. Iraq pledged troops. Saudi Arabia began mobilizing forces for the Jordanian front. On June 4, the Israeli cabinet voted to go to war. The next morning, at 7:45 Israeli time, the Israeli Air Force launched Operation Focus.
Operation Focus — How a War Ends Before It Begins
The core idea was straightforward: Egypt had the largest and most modern air force in the Arab world — around 420 combat aircraft, including 30 Tu-16 medium bombers capable of reaching Israeli cities. If those planes got off the ground in the opening hours of a war, the results for Israel would be severe. So Israel decided not to give them the chance.
Israeli ground crews had been trained for years in rapid aircraft refitting, which let a single plane fly four sorties a day compared to the one or two that Arab air forces typically managed. Pilots spent months memorizing target layouts in detail and ran rehearsals on dummy runways in total secrecy. The Egyptians had constructed no hardened aircraft shelters capable of protecting their planes from attack. Their air defense system was, by any standard, extremely poor.
On the morning of June 5, all but twelve of Israel's operational jets took off. Most flew low over the Mediterranean, below Egyptian radar cover, then turned south toward Egypt. Others flew out over the Red Sea. The timing was deliberate — Egyptian pilots patrolled at sunrise, then landed. By 7:45, the planes were on the ground and the pilots were at breakfast.
In roughly three hours, Israel destroyed approximately 338 Egyptian aircraft — all 30 Tu-16 bombers among them — mostly sitting on runways. Cratering bombs, developed jointly with France, shredded the tarmac and trapped any surviving planes that might otherwise have taken off. Radar installations and surface-to-air missile batteries were hit alongside the aircraft. One hundred Egyptian pilots were killed. Israel lost 19 planes.
By the end of that first day, Israel had also destroyed all 21 of Jordan's Hawker Hunters at their airbases and severely damaged the Syrian Air Force, which lost around two-thirds of its combat strength. Arab air forces across three countries had effectively ceased to exist as operational forces.
This mattered for absolutely everything that followed. Every ground battle in the Sinai, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights unfolded under Israeli air dominance. Egyptian and Jordanian and Syrian soldiers fought armor and infantry while Israeli jets operated freely above them. That's not a fight anyone wins.
Israeli troops examine the wreckage of Egyptian aircraft destroyed in the opening hours of June 5, 1967. Operation Focus eliminated roughly 338 Egyptian planes, almost entirely on the ground, before most Egyptian pilots had finished breakfast.
Sinai: The Ground Race
The ground campaign in the Sinai launched the same morning as Operation Focus. While the airstrikes were still running, Israeli armored divisions crossed the border into Egyptian-held territory on three axes simultaneously.
Egypt had roughly 100,000 troops and 950 tanks in the Sinai, organized in seven divisions and backed by over a thousand artillery pieces. The defensive positions were strong and deeply built — but they'd been designed around a specific assumption: that Israel would repeat the 1956 war and attack along the central and southern routes. Israel attacked via the northern and central routes instead, and in several places chose to go around Egyptian strongpoints rather than straight through them.
The early fighting was genuinely hard. Around Khan Yunis and Rafah in the first day, Israeli casualties were real and significant. Colonel Gonen's lead battalions ran into intense fire that pinned them down before breaking through. By nightfall, the northern Israeli division had cleared its objectives but paid a noticeable price to do it.
Then things accelerated fast. By the second day, Arish had fallen and Israeli forces were pushing further west and south. By the third, Ariel Sharon's division was fighting toward the passes at Mitla and Gidi — the mountain corridors through which Egyptian units would have to move to reach the Suez Canal.
Then came the collapse. Egyptian Field Marshal Amer, hearing about the fall of Abu-Ageila, panicked and ordered a general retreat across the entire Sinai. The order came without detailed instructions. Units that had still been fighting coherently were suddenly told to pull back across 200 kilometers of open desert without a clear plan.
What followed was catastrophic. Retreating Egyptian columns were hit from the air as they moved west. The passes became killing grounds — Israeli armor had gotten there first and set up blocking positions. Thousands of soldiers who never reached those positions died in the desert heat with limited food and water, cut off from their units. Others surrendered in such numbers that Israel eventually stopped processing prisoners and simply directed men toward the canal.
On June 7, Israeli forces took Sharm el-Sheikh, the city controlling the Straits of Tiran. That afternoon, Dayan announced the Straits were open to international navigation. Gaza fell the same day. The Sinai was completely in Israeli hands by June 8.
Jordan Walks Into a War It Didn't Want
King Hussein of Jordan didn't want to fight Israel in June 1967. That's the honest read of the historical record. He'd signed a defense pact with Nasser largely under political pressure — the kind that comes from not wanting to be seen standing aside while your Arab neighbors fight — but he wasn't looking for a war.
What happened instead was one of the more consequential misinformation events of the entire conflict. Just before 9:00 in the morning on June 5, Egypt's Field Marshal Amer sent a cable to Jordan's Egyptian-appointed military commander. Amer had a radar sighting of Israeli aircraft — which he claimed was an Egyptian squadron heading out to attack Israel. He ordered the Jordanians to open a second front immediately.
Those planes were the Israeli Air Force coming back from bombing raids over Egypt. Amer was, for whatever reason, passing a fiction as operational intelligence. The Jordanian commander, receiving what looked like news of Egyptian success, passed the attack order up the chain.
Israel had sent King Hussein a message that same morning through UN intermediaries: stay out of the war and Israel wouldn't touch Jordanian territory. Hussein's reply was that it was already too late.
At 10:00 a.m., Jordanian 155mm Long Tom cannons opened up on the suburbs of Tel Aviv and on Israeli military airbases. Jordanian howitzers fired around 6,000 shells at Israeli Jerusalem over the course of the morning. Twenty Israeli civilians were killed. More than a thousand buildings were damaged.
By midday, Israel had destroyed all 21 of Jordan's Hawker Hunters on the ground. The Royal Jordanian Air Force had ceased to exist before lunch on the first day of the war. Jordan would fight the rest of it with its army and artillery alone, with Israeli aircraft operating over its positions without any meaningful opposition.
Ammunition Hill north of Jerusalem was one of the most costly engagements of the entire war. Israeli paratroopers fought through trenches and bunkers in close combat for four hours. Thirty-six Israelis and 71 Jordanians were killed before the position fell.
The Battle for Jerusalem
The fight for Jerusalem was different in character from everything happening in the Sinai. In the desert, the battles were between armored columns and air power across wide open spaces. In Jerusalem, it was infantry in narrow streets, paratroopers clearing trenches by hand, night fighting in a city full of things that absolutely could not be destroyed.
The worst single engagement was Ammunition Hill — a fortified Jordanian position on high ground north of the city, held by defenders who were deeply dug in and well-armed. Israeli paratroopers from the 66th battalion came in through barbed wire using Bangalore torpedoes, then fought in the trenches. Hand to hand, in some places. Almost every Israeli officer was killed in the first part of the battle. The men kept fighting without most of their officers for the next several hours. The hill fell after four. Thirty-six Israelis and 71 Jordanians died there.
Dayan had initially ordered his troops not to enter the Old City. He was worried about international reaction, about damage to the religious sites inside, about the particular difficulties of urban combat in a place with stone alleyways and centuries of architectural compression. He held the order through most of the second day.
On June 7, he heard the UN Security Council was moving toward a ceasefire resolution. He changed his mind, without cabinet clearance, and gave the order to take the Old City. Two paratrooper battalions attacked the high ground overlooking it from the east. A third battalion, personally led by Colonel Mordechai Gur, broke through the Lion's Gate.
The paratroopers met almost no resistance inside. The Jordanian defenders had pulled back.
Gur's radio transmission — 'The Temple Mount is in our hands' — became one of the war's most repeated lines. The photograph taken at the Western Wall a few hours later became something else entirely: a document of a moment too large for the faces in it to fully contain.
The Golan Heights: The War's Last Act
Syria had been shelling northern Israeli settlements from the Golan Heights for years before June 1967. The Golan is a high volcanic plateau that rises steeply from the Sea of Galilee — from below, the western escarpment looks almost like a wall, climbing 500 meters before flattening into a plateau. Attacking it from the bottom, against fortified positions with the elevation advantage, was going to be expensive.
Moshe Dayan opposed the attack for most of the war. He thought the casualties would be catastrophic. He was also watching Soviet ship movements in the Mediterranean and didn't want to hand Moscow a reason to intervene. Even with Egypt and Jordan effectively finished, he held back.
Several things shifted his thinking by June 9. Intelligence assessments put Soviet intervention as less likely than feared. Reconnaissance was showing parts of the Syrian defenses beginning to break down. And an intercepted cable revealed that Nasser was privately urging the Syrian president to accept a ceasefire as quickly as possible — meaning Egypt's leader believed the war was already lost.
Syria had actually announced its acceptance of a UN ceasefire at 3:00 in the morning on June 9. Dayan issued the order to attack anyway, four hours later.
The first day on the Golan was the hardest fighting Israeli forces had seen in the entire war. Engineering corps bulldozers clearing paths through Syrian minefields were hit almost immediately — five of eight were knocked out. Israeli tanks moved slowly on narrow mountain tracks under fire from positions above them. At Tel Fakhr, a navigational error placed the Golani Brigade directly in front of Syrian gun emplacements. Every tank and half-track in the assault was lost. The surviving soldiers, around twenty-five men, dismounted and took the position on foot.
Then, on June 10, the Syrian defense began coming apart. Officers abandoned their men. Soldiers deserted. Damascus Radio — apparently trying to pressure the United Nations into enforcing the ceasefire — broadcast the fall of the city of Quneitra three hours before it actually surrendered. That premature announcement, heard by Syrian forces still in the field, accelerated the collapse it was meant to prevent.
Israeli forces found bunkers full of abandoned equipment in working condition. At one fortified village, Golani Brigade soldiers walked in to find a small group of Syrian soldiers chained to their positions.
The ceasefire took effect at sunset on June 10. Israel held the Golan Heights.
The Golan campaign was the most costly Israeli operation of the war — the plateau's terrain stripped away most of the advantages Israel had enjoyed in the Sinai and West Bank, forcing infantry and armor to fight uphill against well-fortified defenders until the Syrian defense broke on the second day.
What Six Days Changed — And What They Didn't
The military numbers from the Six-Day War are stark. Between 9,800 and 15,000 Egyptian soldiers were killed or listed as missing. Jordan lost around 700. Syria somewhere between 1,000 and 2,500. Israel's dead numbered between 776 and 983. The asymmetry is one of the most dramatic in modern warfare.
But the numbers that shaped the decades that followed weren't the military ones. Around 280,000 to 325,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from the West Bank. More than 100,000 Syrians left the Golan Heights. These weren't temporary displacements that would reverse when the fighting stopped — the territories stayed under Israeli control, and most of those people never went home.
After the war, Israel made what it described as a peace offer: return the Sinai to Egypt and the Golan to Syria in exchange for peace agreements. The Arab League met in Khartoum in September 1967 and responded with what became known as the Three No's: no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiation with Israel. The Suez Canal, which Egypt had closed at the war's outbreak, stayed shut until 1975.
The United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 242 in November 1967 — the so-called land for peace formula, calling for Israeli withdrawal from occupied territories and recognition of every state's right to live in peace within secure borders. It became the baseline for Middle East diplomacy for the next several decades, parsed endlessly by everyone involved.
Some of the diplomatic gaps did eventually close. Egypt and Israel made peace at Camp David in 1978, and Israel completed its withdrawal from the Sinai in 1982. Jordan and Israel signed a peace treaty in 1994. The Suez Canal reopened. Normal relations, where they existed, slowly developed.
The West Bank and Gaza were different. The questions about what to do with those territories that opened in the summer of 1967 generated arguments that are still ongoing — about settlements, sovereignty, security arrangements, borders, and the status of Jerusalem — none of which were anywhere near resolution in June 1967 and none of which have been resolved since.
The three paratroopers in the Western Wall photograph were named Zion Karasenti, Yitzhak Yifat, and Haim Oshri. David Rubinger took the picture. It captured something true about the shock of the moment — the sense of being inside an event too large to process in real time.
The event is still being processed.