The Six-Day War

The Quiet Before the Sirens

It is June 4, 1967, and the city of Jerusalem sits taut as a drawn wire. On the Mount of Olives, families gather inside their homes, glued to radio sets that crackle with rumor and rising panic. Across the Middle East, armies mobilize, and in Tel Aviv, the traffic rolls with a strange purpose—cars, trucks, buses, all filled with soldiers reporting to duty stations. The sky, just before sunrise, is still unbroken by the roar that will soon come.

No one can say they weren’t warned. For weeks, the signs piled up like thunderheads on the horizon. But nobody—not the generals, not the shopkeepers, not even the world’s diplomats—knows that by next week, the Middle East will be an entirely different map.

Fault Lines and Crossing Points

The Six-Day War didn’t spring out of thin air. Its roots twisted back nearly two decades, all the way to the first Arab–Israeli war in 1948. That war ended not in peace, but in uneasy armistice lines, leaving Israel embattled and its neighbors—Egypt, Syria, Jordan—aggrieved and wary. In the years that followed, the region settled into a dangerous routine: border skirmishes, retaliatory strikes, and the cat-and-mouse of Palestinian fedayeen slipping across frontiers and Israeli patrols trying to intercept them.

By the early 1960s, these patterns had become a grinding backdrop to everyday life. Israeli villages near the Syrian border rehearsed evacuation drills for children each time artillery began to rumble from the Golan Heights. In Gaza and the West Bank, daily existence was itself a form of resilience for many Palestinians—some still in the lands they called home, others already refugees of the last war.

The Cold War, meanwhile, draped over all this like a second, invisible front. American and Soviet interests fueled arms races and diplomatic rivalries, leaving the local players more heavily armed and more isolated than ever.

Then, in May 1967, came the sparks. Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, proud and outspoken, ordered UN peacekeepers out of the Sinai Peninsula—a force that had stood guard since the Suez Crisis of 1956. Next, Nasser closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, choking off a vital economic artery. Israel called it an act of war. Syria and Jordan mobilized their armies. Iraq sent reinforcements. The world watched, paralyzed by fear of what a bigger conflict might do.

Inside Israel’s cabinet, tempers flared and nerves frayed. Prime Minister Levi Eshkol hesitated, torn between pleas for restraint and the military’s warnings that survival itself was now at stake. In the final days of May, after desperate back-channel negotiations collapsed, Israel’s government caved to its generals’ urgency. The order was given. War would not wait.

Day One: The Sound of Everything Changing

Dawn, June 5, 1967. The cockpit clocks tick just after seven in the morning as Israeli pilots throttle their Mirage and Mystère jets off the runway. This is Operation Focus—one of the most ambitious opening gambits in modern military history. Their target: Egypt’s air force, still lolling in the comfort of its hangars, unaware.

Within a matter of hours, the Middle East’s skies are changed forever. Nearly 200 Egyptian aircraft explode in fire and twisted metal. The Israeli Air Force turns west for home, leaving runways cratered, hangars blazing. In Cairo, the realization comes too late: Egypt’s air cover is gone.

Calls crackle from Jordan, Syria, and Iraq—alliances locked by mutual suspicion and now by the irresistible pull of battle. To the north, Syrian guns open up on Israeli settlements. Jordanian artillery drops shells into West Jerusalem. Israel, holding back for just a moment, sends a final plea to King Hussein: stay out. Hussein, convinced Egypt is crushing the Israelis, presses on.

The front lines burn. In Sinai, Israeli tanks and infantry punch through Egyptian positions, taking town after town. Israeli paratroopers move toward Gaza. The West Bank becomes a battlefield—Israeli forces capture Jenin and Qalqilya, closing in on Jerusalem herself.

The Old City: Stones, Flags, and Prayers

Jerusalem was always something more than geography. By June 7, Israeli soldiers are within reach of the Old City’s ramparts, the narrow maze of stone, prayer, and memory that had been divided since 1948. The fighting is brutal—street by street, building by building, with Jordanian defenders dug in.

Then, in one of the most iconic moments of the war, Israeli paratroopers breach the Lion’s Gate. Shots echo along the cobbles. The Western Wall, silent since the armistice, stands exposed. General Motta Gur, radio pressed to his ear, issues the words that will be played and replayed for decades: “The Temple Mount is in our hands.” Young men in olive uniforms press fingers to thousand-year-old stones and weep. Flags are planted, not just as military signals, but as emblems of something crushed and now revived.

Retreat, Pursuit, and the Race for Ceasefire

For Egypt, the war becomes a rout. Israeli columns push through the Sinai, moving faster than planners believed possible. Egyptian units, leaderless and stunned by the destruction of their air force, abandon armor and artillery in retreat to the Suez Canal. There’s chaos on the sand and a stampede of refugees on the roads. Outnumbered Israeli forces, by now emboldened and battle-drunk, reach the banks of the Suez by June 8.

Jordan’s forces, battered and isolated, can hold no more. Israeli troops have overrun the West Bank and stand on the banks of the Jordan River.

Only Syria, perched on the Golan Heights’ formidable ridges, seems ready for more. On June 9, Israeli soldiers—exhausted, some fighting their third enemy in as many days—mount a grueling assault up the Golan’s steep, fortified slopes. Syrian positions fall one after the other. By midday June 10, the heights are taken.

On a warm evening, the United Nations’ telegrams finally carry weight. Egypt, Jordan, and Syria agree to a ceasefire. The shooting stops, and the counting begins.

The Costs Measured in Loss

What does six days of war really buy? When it’s over, the numbers come filtering in through wire services, hospital wards, and devastated towns. Israel has lost nearly a thousand soldiers and over two thousand wounded—her own losses, but fewer than her planners feared. On the other side, the toll is staggering: Egypt alone estimates between 9,800 and 15,000 dead or missing; Jordan, almost 700; Syria, around 2,500. There are entire units that simply vanish amid the desert’s silence.

For civilians, the reckoning is quieter and more enduring. Cities like Qalqilya and Suez are torn open by shelling, houses reduced to bones and rubble. Somewhere between a quarter and a half million Palestinians leave their homes in the West Bank and Gaza, the second mass exodus in a single generation. From the Golan, almost every Syrian resident flees or is forced to leave.

Debris of war lies everywhere—burned-out tanks haunched like broken toys across the Sinai, the Golan honeycombed with craters, bridges and roads destroyed. In Cairo, bread lines lengthen; the Suez Canal, once a global trade route, sits choked shut by scuttled ships and the mess of battle.

Borders—And History—Redrawn

When the dust settles, the map is unrecognizable. Israel now occupies the Sinai Peninsula, Gaza Strip, the West Bank—including East Jerusalem—and the Golan Heights. Its territory has nearly tripled. The triumph is immediate and intoxicating for Israelis, who for the first time feel secure behind “defensible borders.” But to the Arab world, the loss is catastrophic—a humiliation and a wound that will not scab over.

The Bank of Israel scrambles to cope with the cost: occupation means not just victory, but responsibility—administration, policing, rebuilding. In Egypt, billions of dollars of lost infrastructure and economic pain compound the agony. For Jordan, half its population is now refugees. In the Golan, whole villages are abandoned to ruin.

Fallout: Waiting for a Different Peace

Victors and vanquished alike turn to the United Nations, but in the Security Council’s chamber, language itself becomes a battlefield. Resolution 242 calls for a withdrawal from “territories occupied in the recent conflict” in return for “recognition of every state in the area.” The missing ‘the’—“the territories”—will haunt negotiations for decades.

International aid organizations scramble to shelter another wave of Palestinian refugees, the camps swelling in Jordan, Syria, and beyond. The Suez Canal remains impassable, a casualty of war’s byproducts, blocking east-west commerce for years.

In Israel, euphoria mixes with dread. The memory of encirclement and existential fear lingers; the burden of ruling over a million new Palestinian citizens is something few politicians had considered. Around kitchen tables and in Knesset debates, a new, sharper Israeli divide emerges: how to settle these lands, how to make peace, how to move on—or if moving on is even possible.

For Arab states, recovery is more than logistical. Nasser’s pan-Arab vision shatters; military doctrines are rewritten, allegiances realigned. The Soviet Union sends advisors and weapons to Egypt, and across the frontiers, an arms race accelerates. The quiet after the war is brief: soon, Egyptian and Israeli forces will exchange fire in the so-called War of Attrition along the canal.

What Remains

With the passage of years, what happened in June 1967 has never returned to abstraction. Declassified minutes from Israeli war rooms reveal just how close the country’s leadership felt to the brink—yet historians still debate whether the threat was as dire as believed, or whether a diplomatic off-ramp ever really existed.

The war’s fingerprints remain everywhere: in the checkpoints ringing the West Bank, in the hulking silence of the Golan’s abandoned villages, in the bittersweet reunions and ongoing suffering of Palestinian families. Jerusalem is one city now, though never truly whole. The “land for peace” formula, born of these six days, haunts every negotiation from Camp David to Oslo and beyond.

It would be easy, from a remove of decades, to see the Six-Day War as inevitable, or its outcome foreordained by greater powers. But step closer, and it’s still clear: these were the actions of real men and women, acting in real fear and hope, in a world where a week was enough to change everything—borders, families, even the shape of memory itself.

Standing in that June sunlight half a century ago, surrounded by wreckage and new lines drawn in the sand, nobody could know how fiercely the shadows would linger. The war’s echoes are not gone. They are with us still, in the tense silence before the next siren, the next decision, the next day.