A false report starts the countdown
The war ran from 5 to 10 June 1967, pitting Israel against a coalition led by Egypt, Syria and Jordan. It followed weeks of escalation: Egyptian President Nasser received a false Soviet intelligence report in May claiming Israeli troops were massing against Syria, prompting him to move Egyptian forces into the Sinai Peninsula on 16 May, expel United Nations peacekeeping personnel from Gaza and Sinai on 19 May, and close the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping on 22 to 23 May, a move Israel had previously and explicitly stated would constitute grounds for war. Israel opened the conflict with a surprise air assault on 5 June, and within six days had defeated Arab forces on three separate fronts.
A blockade Israel had already called an act of war
The war’s opening hours are documented in unusual detail because of Operation Focus, the Israeli air assault launched at 7:45 a.m. on 5 June that destroyed approximately 338 Egyptian aircraft, including all thirty of its Tu-16 bombers, securing Israeli air superiority almost immediately and shaping the entire remaining course of the fighting. Ground operations across the Sinai, West Bank and Golan Heights fronts are similarly well recorded through military archives from all sides, though casualty figures still carry meaningful ranges, Israeli military deaths between 776 and 983 against Egyptian deaths estimated between 9,800 and 15,000, reflecting the difficulty of precise wartime accounting even for a conflict this thoroughly studied.
Air supremacy within hours
The war’s shape followed directly from the perception, on both sides, that further delay favoured the other: Nasser’s military buildup and blockade were read in Israel as preparation for an existential attack, a reading reinforced by President Lyndon Johnson’s own description of Nasser’s closure of the straits as an arbitrary and dangerous decision, while Egypt, Syria and Jordan calculated, based partly on faulty intelligence, that coordinated pressure could force concessions from Israel without full-scale war actually breaking out. Israel’s decision to strike first, achieving near-total surprise, proved decisive in compressing what might otherwise have been a longer, more evenly matched conflict into less than a week.
Three fronts in six days
Whether Israel’s opening strike constituted legitimate pre-emptive self-defence or an act of aggression remains genuinely disputed among historians and international commentators, a debate that turns substantially on how much weight to give Egypt’s blockade and troop movements as an imminent threat versus treating Israel’s strike as the war’s actual initiating act of violence. A separate and still unresolved controversy concerns the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, an American intelligence-gathering ship, which killed thirty-four American naval personnel; Israel has maintained the attack was a mistaken identification, though the incident remains a point of continued disagreement rather than a fully settled matter.
A war with a friendly-fire incident still unresolved
The war’s territorial consequences proved remarkably durable: Israel occupied the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, the West Bank including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, reshaping the region’s territorial disputes for decades afterward, and displacing an estimated 413,000 Palestinians in the process. Egypt closed the Suez Canal for nearly a decade, until 1975, and Nasser’s initial resignation in the war’s aftermath was reversed within days after large public protests demanded he remain in office, an episode that itself illustrates how much popular legitimacy Nasser retained even immediately following a decisive military defeat.
Territory that outlasted the ceasefire
This is essential reading for understanding the territorial map of the contemporary Middle East, since so many current disputes trace directly back to the six days covered here, from the West Bank to the Golan Heights to Gaza. It rewards attention for its precise, hour-by-hour account of how quickly a war can be decided once air superiority is secured. It leaves you without a settled verdict on the pre-emption question or on the USS Liberty incident, both presented as genuinely contested rather than resolved. Readers should come prepared for that open-endedness rather than expecting the material to adjudicate disputes that continue to divide historians and governments alike decades later.