In Sinai, at 10:00 P.M., six battalions of 105-mm and 155-mm guns fired the largest barrage in Israeli military history, leveling 6,000 shells in less than twenty minutes on Umm Qatef. “Let everything tremble,” Sharon purportedly announced. While Israeli tanks continued to pound the northernmost Egyptian defenses, IDF infantrymen poured into the triple line of trenches in the east, and paratroopers neutralized Egypt’s artillery to the west. This was the implementation of what Sharon called “a continuous unfolding of surprises”—striking the enemy from multiple and unexpected directions, simultaneously, at night. One Egyptian officer, taken prisoner, agreed: “It was like watching a snake of fire uncoiling.”
The Egyptians were devastated. Throughout the day, they had heard ecstatic news reports of Arab victories. “We heard about the war from the radio,” recalled Hasan Bahgat, a senior intelligence officer positioned behind Umm Qatef. “The whole world thought that our forces were at the outskirts of Tel Aviv.” Military Order 4, released by ‘Amer’s headquarters at 11:45 A.M., reported that “a ground clash occurred along the border, with the enemy attempting to break through our front line defenses in Sinai. The attack failed.” This was followed by Military Orders 12 and 13, at 4:30 and 6:00, which claimed that the Israeli forces attacking Kuntilla and Umm Qatef had been either driven off or destroyed. Gen. Murtagi, who had never anticipated a direct Israeli assault on Umm Qatef, ordered counterattacks from his forces at Jabal Libni and Bir Lahfan. Neither succeeded, blocked by Israeli lodgments on the roads and relentlessly bombed from the air. Despairing of reinforcements, Egyptian commanders in Umm Qatef ordered artillery barrages onto their own positions.43
Not all went smoothly for the Israelis, though. Half the helicopters transporting Dani Matt’s paratroopers got lost and never found the battlefield; others could not land because of mortar fire. An entire armored brigade under Col. Mordechai Zippori, attacking the front, was stalled for want of a single mine-clearing tank, while Col. Nir, having broken through the rear defenses at Ruwafa Dam, was hit by a tank shell and severely injured in both legs. Yet the overall plan was largely maintained and in some respects exceeded. At a cost of 40 killed and 140 wounded, the Israelis had broken through the Egyptian defenses and were poised to attack Umm Qatef.
A similar fate was met by virtually all of Egypt’s first-defense line in Sinai. Further south, the 8th Armored Brigade under Col. Avraham (Albert) Mendler, initially positioned as a ruse to draw off Egyptian forces from the real invasion routes, struck and captured the fortified bunkers at Kuntilla. In an action later lionized by Egyptian military history, reconnaissance troops put up a valiant fight. “The battalion placed ambushes for the advancing enemy forces which outnumbered us in quantity and firing capacity,” one recon officer, Yahya Sa‘ad Basha, recalled. “They confronted them fearlessly and hit a number of Israeli tanks. Only three Egyptian tanks remained and one of these was damaged. Most of the officers and soldiers were killed. I watched my battalion disintegrate…I saw the bodies of soldiers after the Israeli tanks had run them over…I saw the wounded lying on the ground and was utterly unable to help them.” By nightfall, Mendler’s men had achieved a strategically valuable position, able to prevent Shazli Force from aiding Umm Qatef and also to join Sharon’s next major engagement, at Nakhl.
In the north, Tal’s division consolidated its hold on Rafah and Khan Yunis, and reached the outskirts of al-‘Arish. “Clearing the city was hard fighting,” according to the IDF record. “The Egyptians fired from the rooftops, from balconies and windows. They dropped grenades into our half-tracks and blocked the streets with trucks. Our men threw the grenades back and crushed the trucks with their tanks.”
Between Tal and Sharon’s forces, close to midnight and with lights blazing, passed the third of Israel’s southern divisions—Gen. Yoffe’s—en route to Bir Lahfan and Jabal Libni. Skirting Abu ‘Ageila to the north, threading through Sharon’s battlefield and exchanging friendly fire with some of his tanks, the lead Centurions of Col. Elhanan Sela advanced and turned southwest. Farther to the north, in the sandy wastes of Wadi Haridin, inched the 200th Brigade of Col. Yissachar “Yiska” Shadmi. Believed impassable by the Egyptians, the wadi had been studied by IDF paratroopers in 1956 and found suitable for tanks. Bedeviled by mines and artillery bombardments, Sela and Shadmi nevertheless managed to cut off all the major road junctions—to Jabal Libni, Abu ‘Ageila, and al-’Arish—and to stop two Egyptian armored brigades attempting to encircle Sharon.
Less success attended the Israelis’ advance in a battle they had hoped to avoid, in Gaza. Dayan had expressly forbade entry into the twenty-five-mile Strip, explaining that Israel did not need to saddle itself with 250,000 Palestinian refugees and complicated inner-city fighting. Yet, shortly after issuance of the Red Sheet order, Palestinian positions in Gaza opened fire on nearby Israeli settlements of Nirim and Kisufim. Rabin overruled Dayan’s orders and instructed a reinforced mechanized brigade, the 11th, under Col. Yehuda Reshef, to enter the Strip. The force promptly met withering artillery fire and spirited opposition from Palestinian soldiers and remnants of the 7th Division from Rafah. “The Egyptian soldier, by his nature, is better at static than mobile defense,” Rafael Eitan, the paratrooper commander, observed. “The Palestinian soldiers, by contrast, were more willing to make sacrifices.”
Seventy Israelis would be killed in some of the war’s heaviest fighting. Also killed were Ben Oyserman of the CBC, Life magazine’s Paul Schutzer, whose final photographs would appear in a special edition on the war, and twelve more members of UNEF. By sunset, IDF forces had taken the strategically vital ‘Ali Muntar ridge, overlooking Gaza city, but were beaten back from the city itself.44
Other unanticipated battles continued to rage along the eastern front, where the resistance offered the Israelis was no less dogged. Around Jenin, the Jordanians’ 12th Armored Battalion held off repeated attempts by Bar Kokhva’s column—a far larger force—to break through Burqin woods, close by the Kabatiya cross-roads. The deputy battalion commander, Maj. Muhammad Sa’id al-‘Ajluni, ordered the woods held “to the last man and shell,” and claimed to have destroyed eighteen Israeli tanks. “Confused and panicky, the Israelis were running around their blazing vehicles like frightened ants,”‘Ajluni’s commander, Maj. Salah ‘Alayyan, recorded. But relentless IAF air strikes began to take their toll on the Jordanians. Their M-48 Pattons, equipped with external fuel tanks, proved vulnerable at short distances, even to Israel’s older Shermans. Twelve of ‘Ajluni’s tanks were destroyed, and only six remained operative. Then, just after dusk, ‘Ajluni spotted lights approaching from the south that he believed belonged to reinforcements from the 40th Armored Brigade. In fact, they were the lights of yet more Israeli tanks which, once within range, immediately opened fire.
“The Jordanians fought bravely and effectively,” conceded an official Israeli history of the battle, “Their tanks and antitank weapons had to be destroyed before the [Peled’s] Ugdah could proceed to higher ground and the enemy’s infantry positions.” Ephraim Reiner, commander of the IDF’s 37th Armored Brigade, described how his forces were unable to advance without first waiting for supporting artillery fire and air strikes against the enemy. “One plane swung around and dove right onto the Jordanian commander’s tank, wounding him and killing his radio operator and intelligence officer. Only then did I inform the division that I was attacking…a classic night attack, very nice.” Wounded, ‘Ajluni ordered his surviving tanks to fall back to Jenin where, together with the remnants of Khalidi’s 25th Infantry Brigade, they found themselves effectively surrounded.45
The IDF’s breakthrough in the northern West Bank was mirrored in the Jerusalem area, where Ben-Ari’s 10th Brigade was approaching Bidu and the crucial Beit Iksa-Beit Hanina junction. Another Brigade, the 4th, under Col. Moshe Yotvat, had been thrown together from sundry infantry units and sent to open the Latrun Corridor. The Jordanian police fort at the corridor’s western entrance—Bab al-Wad in Arabic, and in Hebrew, Sha’ar H
aGai—had withstood successive Israeli forays in 1948, but it fell with surprisingly little resistance in the early evening of June 5. So, too, did the adjacent villages of Yalu, Imwas, and Beit Nuba.
Billeted within those villages were commandos of Egypt’s 33rd and 53rd “Thunderbolt” battalions, prepared to attack Israeli airfields. “The patrols, each led by Jordanian intelligence scouts, moved out toward Ramla and Hatzor at 7:00 P.M.,” confirmed commando officer ‘Ali‘Abd al-Mun’im Marsi. “We started infiltrating through Israeli settlements…We had no clear idea of our assignment, only a palm-sized photograph of one of the bases.” Marsi’s men were soon detected, however, and sought shelter in nearby fields, which the Israelis then set on fire. Of the original force of 600 commandos, only 150 survived and fled to Jordan.
“They’ll be in the city within two hours,” Deputy Chief of Staff Haim Bar-Lev, referring to the Harel Brigade’s tanks, blithely reported to the government that evening. Within the city, too, the confrontation was coming to a head. Starting at 7:45 P.M., salvos of Israeli mortar and artillery shells saturated the Jordanian positions along the so-called northern line leading from the Mandelbaum Gate up to Mount Scopus. Flares and search beams lit up the night. Israeli infantrymen stationed along that line received their first relief from the Jordanian shell and small-arms fire that had continued unabated throughout the day. For Motta Gur’s paratroopers, though, the countermeasures were merely preparations for the pending effort to burst through the Arab neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah and link up with Mount Scopus. Resisting that assault was a dense network of obstacles—bunkers, barbed wire, and mines.
Rabin tried to persuade Gur to delay his attack until dawn, when cover could be provided by the IAF, but the offer was promptly declined. Jets were of little use in the close, street-by-street fighting ahead, Gur explained, while the paratroopers preferred to fight in darkness. Also, if fighting intensified in Sinai, or broke out with Syria, the army might postpone the Jerusalem operation indefinitely. Gur hoped to move out at midnight, but logistical difficulties delayed H-hour until 2:15 A.M., leaving only ninety minutes before daybreak. Yet the colonel remained confident, later writing, “We knew that the Arabs would defend Jerusalem from its fixed positions…[and] that they never constructed a second defense line. Once we broke through [the first line], our progress would be easy.”46
Jordan’s brigades in the Jerusalem area—King Talal, Hittin, and Imam ‘Ali—were indeed immobile, with little coordination or even communication between them. By the late afternoon, however, as the Israeli attacks intensified, command over the city was entrusted to King Talal’s general, ‘Ata ‘Ali Haza‘. The 44-year-old ‘Ali, mild-mannered and slight, a soldier since the age of fifteen, had been decorated for gallantry in fighting near the Mandelbaum Gate in 1948. A graduate of England’s Camberley College, he was a no-nonsense officer, deeply patriotic, and averse to Arab radicals. “Before 1967, I had no fear that Israel would start a war,” he attested, “but since 1956, I feared that Nasser would.” While deploring Jordan’s entanglement in “Nasser’s war,” he was determined to hold out in Jerusalem, at least until a cease-fire.
‘Ata ‘Ali ordered his forces consolidated in a line extending from Abu Tor in the south and northward to the Old City, Sheikh Jarrah, and Tel al-Ful astride Mount Scopus. At his disposal were 5,000 Jordanian troops and 1,000 Palestinian militiamen, armed with heavy mortars, machine-guns, and howitzers. But he had no tanks, and believed that the Israeli forces outnumbered his own by at least three-to-one. Though his own transmitter was seriously damaged, ‘Ata ‘Ali managed to get a message through to Maj. Gen. Muhammad Ahmad Salim, commander of the Western Front, urging him to send tanks and troops immediately.
Salim obliged and dispatched a Patton battalion from the 60th Armored Brigade. Like the 40th, the 60th Brigade was a corps d’élite, commanded by King Hussein’s cousin, Brig. Sharif Zayd bin Shaker, a graduate of the U.S. Army Staff College. His original orders were to repel Israeli forces from the Latrun Corridor, but in view of the worsening situation in Jerusalem itself, the brigade was now to proceed to the city’s Arab suburbs and from there attack Mount Scopus. Inching forward in the dark, the tanks climbed the twenty-mile, 2,700-foot ascent from Jericho. Parallel to them, struggling up a mountain track from Wadi Qelt to ‘Isawiya, came infantrymen from Imam ‘Ali Brigade. Well before they reached their destinations, though, both forces were spotted by Israeli planes and, subjected to rocket and cannon fire, virtually decimated.
At 9:00 that night, just as the Israelis completed their capture of southern Jerusalem and prepared to assault the northern line, ‘Ata ‘Ali saw the sky light up over the Mount of Olives. Instinctively, he knew what had happened. Further appeals to send troops from Ramallah and Hebron were rejected; both cities were braced for attack. Jerusalem would receive no reinforcements.47
The worsening plight of the Jordanians was closely monitored by Israeli leaders. For them, the question now was not whether the IDF would win in Jerusalem, but whether capture of the city’s eastern half was politically prudent. Several members of the government, most notably Menachem Begin and Yigal Allon, emphatically thought so, and throughout the day had pressed Eshkol to approve a Jerusalem offensive. “Sis Agedank,” Eshkol sardonically replied—in Yiddish, slapping a hand to his forehead—“That’s an idea.” The prime minister was once again torn between total confidence in Israel’s fighting ability and fear for its future safety. Now, in addition to Soviet intervention, Israelis faced the danger of censure and even embargo by the Christian world should they capture the Old City and its Holy Places.
Eshkol was not alone; other ministers, most notably those from the National Religious party, shared his fear of an international backlash. But countervailing pressures were also at work, beginning with those from Jordan. Despite repeated Israeli requests, conveyed through diplomatic channels, for a cease-fire, the shelling of outer Tel Aviv and downtown Jerusalem had continued. Dayan, arriving at the Knesset for his own swearing-in ceremony as defense minister, found the building deserted and returned to Tel Aviv. It was not until the early evening that the other ministers managed to get through and, at Begin’s request, convene in an underground shelter.
Begin’s purpose was to discuss the Old City—whether Israeli forces should enter it and what Israel’s policy would be if they did. In addition to the military requisites of forcing Hussein to stop the shelling and of defending Mount Scopus, the ministers were seized by the millennial vision of a united Jewish capital. “Perhaps the most important Cabinet meeting Jerusalem ever held,” Col. Lior wrote, mindful of his own elated state: “As the son of an observant family exterminated in the concentration camps, as the scion of the Jewish people and a citizen of the State of Israel, I could not hold back my soaring emotions.”48
Emotions indeed flared as the ministers, speaking above the basso continuo of incoming shells, spoke their minds. “This is the hour of our political test,” Begin opened. “We must attack the Old City in response both to the unheeded warnings we sent Hussein as well as to the Jordanian shelling.” Allon concurred: “We all want to see the Old City as an indivisible part of Israel—or that Israelis at least have access to the Holy Places.” But Eshkol advised caution. “We have to weigh the diplomatic ramifications of conquering the Old City,” he said, “Even if we take the West Bank and the Old City, we will eventually be forced to leave them.” The NRP’s Haim Moshe Shapira supported Eshkol, declaring, “I assume that there will be pressure to internationalize the city, and I, for one, won’t oppose the idea.” The debate broke down less on ideological than on visceral lines, with Mapai’s Zalman Aran seconding Shapira and Mordechai Bentov, of the left-wing Mapam, siding with Begin. Abba Eban expressed concern for possible damage to the Holy Places.
In the end, the ministers agreed not to agree, accepting a compromise formula proposed by Eshkol: “In view of the situation created in Jerusalem by the Jordanian bombardment, and after warnings were sent to Hussein, an opportunit
y has perhaps been created to capture the Old City.” The immediate task, however, was to silence the Jordanian guns.
Dayan was already wrestling with that question, deep in the Pit with his generals—Rabin, Weizman, Bar-Lev. “I know what you want,” he told them. “You want to take Jenin.” None of them raised an objection, nor did Dayan demur. Thus, laconically, the first step was authorized for Israel’s entry into the West Bank. As for Jerusalem, Dayan ordered another message sent to Hussein, this one threatening to bomb Amman if his forces persisted in bombarding Israel. In the interim, the IDF could press its attacks to the north and south of the Old City, surrounding it. “The Old City can be in our hands by tomorrow,” Dayan responded when Eshkol informed him of the Cabinet’s discussion. But the defense minister was determined to delay that action even longer, until the conquest of Sinai was complete.49
The Egyptian and Jordanian fronts remained intrinsically related. Jordan’s bombing of Israel came in reaction to Israel’s attack on Egypt, the early success of which enabled Israel to strike back at Jordan. Another nexus existed in the fact that neither Nasser nor Hussein was aware of the perilous state of their armies. Nasser’s officers were afraid to enlighten him while Hussein’s, lacking communications with the field, were clueless. Neither would easily believe that Egypt’s air force, the linchpin of the Arab war effort, had been eliminated in a matter of hours, or that Israeli tanks were advancing on two fronts while the Syrians remained inert. Egypt’s propaganda organs, radio and press, continued to boast of extraordinary victories, while according to Jordanian communiqués, Israeli forces had been repulsed from Jerusalem and Jenin and thirty-one Israeli planes shot down.50 Such ignorance could not withstand the mounting evidence of disaster, however, as the first day of fighting waned.
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