Who attacked first in the Six-Day War?

5 June 1967 · The Six-Day War

Israel fired the opening shot of the Six-Day War at dawn on 5 June 1967, and Egypt had already committed the first act of war three weeks earlier. In eighteen days that May, Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser expelled the UN peacekeeping force that had kept the Sinai border quiet for a decade, poured roughly 100,000 troops and 900 tanks up to Israel’s southern frontier, signed war pacts with Jordan and Iraq, and on 22 May closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, a naval blockade that international law treats as an act of war regardless of what happens next. Nasser said the goal outright: “our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel.” Surrounded on three sides and blockaded on a fourth, Israel struck the armies massed to erase it. Six days later Israel held the Sinai, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, and the map of the Middle East had changed for good. Why 1967 started →

What led to the war: eighteen days in May 1967

The war did not start with the first Israeli sortie; it started with the removal of the buffer that had prevented one. On 16 May, Nasser ordered the UN Emergency Force out of Sinai, and the UN complied within days, a decision that stripped away the tripwire installed after the 1956 Suez war. Egyptian armor rolled into the vacuum on 18 and 19 May. On 22 May, Nasser closed the Straits of Tiran, sealing Israel’s only southern sea route and its oil supply from Iran. Between 26 and 30 May, Jordan’s King Hussein flew to Cairo and placed his army under Egyptian command, Iraqi units began moving toward the front, and Arab state radio broadcast promises to “drive the Jews into the sea.” Israel’s government spent the same weeks pleading with Washington and the UN to break the blockade diplomatically and pressing King Hussein, through back channels, to stay out of a war Jordan had no part in starting. Hussein chose the pact instead.

How the war was fought: three fronts in six days

The war opened at 7:45 on the morning of 5 June with Operation Focus, an Israeli Air Force strike that caught Egypt’s air force on the ground and destroyed most of it, roughly 300 aircraft, within about three hours; strikes against the Jordanian and Syrian air forces followed the same day once both joined the fighting. On the ground, Israeli armored divisions under Yisrael Tal, Ariel Sharon and Avraham Yoffe pushed through the Gaza Strip and across Sinai, reaching the Suez Canal by 8 June. On the eastern front, Jordan shelled Jerusalem and Tel Aviv within hours of Israel’s opening strike, despite Israel’s plea to stay out; Israeli forces then took East Jerusalem and the West Bank in a battle that reached its climax on 7 June, when paratroopers under Motta Gur broke through to the Western Wall and the Temple Mount for the first time since 1948, Gur radioing “Har HaBayit beyadenu,” the Temple Mount is in our hands. Israel held off on the northern front until Egypt and Jordan had been defeated, then attacked Syria’s fortified Golan Heights positions on 9 June, taking the plateau by 10 June, when the last ceasefire ended the war.

Who paid the price: forces and casualties

Israel mobilized nearly its entire reserve army, roughly 264,000 troops against a combined Arab force estimated near 300,000 with far more tanks and aircraft on paper. The honest numbers cut against the myth of an easy war: historians’ estimates put Israeli dead at 776 to 983, with roughly 2,500 wounded, in six days of fighting. Egyptian dead are estimated at 9,800 to 15,000, with several thousand more captured; Jordan lost roughly 700 soldiers; Syria lost an estimated 1,000 to 2,500. Civilian displacement followed the fighting on the Arab side: several hundred thousand Palestinians fled or were driven from the West Bank into Jordan, on top of the population still displaced from 1948, and Syrian civilians left the Golan Heights as the front collapsed. Israel’s own civilians endured the shelling of Jerusalem and towns near the Jordanian and Syrian lines throughout the war’s six days.

What changed: territory, Resolution 242, and the Three No’s

Israel’s territory grew roughly threefold in a week, and for the first time since 1948, all of Jerusalem’s holy sites were in Jewish hands. In November 1967 the UN Security Council passed Resolution 242, the land-for-peace formula that called for Israeli withdrawal from territories captured in the war in exchange for recognition, secure borders and an end to the state of belligerency, deliberately worded to leave the final line for negotiation rather than dictate a return to the 1949 armistice lines. Israel signaled it would trade land for peace almost immediately. The Arab League’s answer came that September at Khartoum: the Three No’s, no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel. Egypt shelled the Suez Canal front within months in what became the War of Attrition, and Palestinians call the defeat the Naksa, the setback, distinct from the 1948 Nakba. The door reopened when Arab leaders chose it: Egypt made peace in 1979 and got the Sinai back in full; Jordan made peace in 1994.

How 1967 is misremembered today

The dominant retelling starts the clock in 1967 with “the occupation,” as though the story of the West Bank and Gaza began there. It skips the nineteen years, 1948 to 1967, when Jordan annexed the West Bank and Egypt ruled Gaza and neither created, offered, or was ever asked to create a Palestinian state, undercutting the claim that Israeli control is the whole grievance. It also relies on a cherry-picked quote, an Israeli general or minister years later musing that Nasser “probably did not intend to attack,” presented as proof the threat was invented. It proves nothing of the kind: closing an international strait to a nation’s shipping is an act of war under international law whatever the closer’s private intentions were, and Nasser paired the blockade with a declared goal of destroying Israel, not a defensive posture. On the eastern front the revisionism is simpler still: it blurs which side chose to open the Jerusalem front, when the documented record is that Israel asked Jordan to stay out and Jordan attacked anyway.

Who attacked first in the 1956 Suez war · Who started the War of Attrition · Who attacked first in the Yom Kippur War · East Jerusalem · Who attacked first, every war · The rejection record

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