Six-Day War

Date

5–10 June 1967

Category

Military & conflict

Region

Middle East (Israel and neighbours)

Era

Contemporary

Significance

Between 5 and 10 June 1967 Israel fought and decisively defeated the combined forces of Egypt, Syria and Jordan in the Six-Day War. Amid rising tensions, Egyptian president Nasser had moved troops into the Sinai, expelled UN peacekeepers and closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping.

Israel launched a pre-emptive air strike (Operation Focus) on 5 June that destroyed most of the Egyptian air force on the ground, securing air supremacy. Within six days Israel captured the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip from Egypt, the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria, more than tripling the territory under its control. A UN-brokered ceasefire ended the fighting. The war displaced an estimated 280,000–325,000 Palestinians and around 100,000 Syrians, and brought a large Palestinian population under Israeli military occupation. Its outcome reshaped the Middle East: it discredited pan-Arab nationalism, made the status of the occupied territories and Jerusalem central to subsequent diplomacy, and underlay UN Security Council Resolution 242 and the enduring Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

Empires active in 5–10 June 1967

• Soviet Union
  1922 CE – 1991 CE
• British Empire
  1583 CE – 1997 CE
• Spanish Empire
  1492 CE – 1976 CE
• Portuguese Empire
  1415 CE – 1999 CE
• Solomonic dynasty
  1270 CE – 1974 CE
• Dutch Empire
  1581 CE – 1975 CE

Related military & conflict events

• Cuban Missile Crisis
  16–28 October 1962
• Fall of Saigon and reunification of Vietnam
  30 April 1975 (reunified 1976)
• Khmer Rouge Seize Cambodia and Declare Year Zero
  1975
• Korean War
  25 June 1950 – 27 July 1953
• Creation of Israel and the 1948 Arab–Israeli War
  14 May 1948 (war May 1948 – July 1949)
• The Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi
  7 April – 19 July 1994

Also relevant

• Prague Spring and the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia
  5 January – 21 August 1968

Further reading

A History of the Modern Middle East

The wider story

A History of the Modern Middle East

William L. Cleveland

The go-to survey of the region from the late Ottoman era to the present.

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