by Jeremy Bowen
Realistic American officials at the UN reported that ‘nobody expects the call to be heeded or this to be the decisive Security Council resolution’. Israel would probably have ignored a ceasefire resolution it did not like for as long as it could. But other stronger resolutions would have followed, increasing the international pressure on Israel and when the war ended it would most likely have been impossible for them to hang on to what they had captured for very long. As the Security Council showed when Israel ignored the call for a ceasefire on the Syrian front later in the week, it was capable of piling on the pressure when it lost patience.
Gaza Strip
In Khan Younis, some Israeli soldiers were still killing civilians. About 100 yards away from the house of the Abu Nahia family, where four Palestinian men had been shot in cold blood, Abd al-Majeed al Farah and his wife Faika, who were both in their late thirties, had spent two days hiding in their basement with their six sons and six daughters. Then the Israelis came and ordered Abd al-Majeed to go with all the other local men to the school, where they would be interrogated. They walked there in single file, at gunpoint.
‘Some soldiers were good,’ he remembers. ‘Others were bad and aggressive. One of us who knew a little Hebrew heard one of them saying, “these are military, we should shoot them.” Another one said, “We can’t do that, we have to call the headquarters in Beersheba.”’
Some of the prisoners at the school were taken out and shot, including his brother’s son. The rest were kept at the school, chained together. They were not unchained when they needed to use the lavatory. They all went together. One of the prisoners was untied so he could open the men’s trousers to let them urinate. After three days most of the men were released. When Abd al-Majeed al Farah arrived home he found the women crying and the bodies of twelve members of his extended family dead in their farmyard. They were all boys and young men, aged between fourteen and eighteen. They seemed to have been shot because they had not obeyed the order to report to the school. One of the women had tried to hide her seventeen-year-old son, but he was dragged out of the basement and shot dead in the street by an Israeli soldier. Abd al-Majeed says none of the dead was a fighter. Because of the curfew, they were not allowed to bury the twelve dead teenagers, or the four dead soldiers who had also been killed on their property. From their house they could smell the bodies as they started to rot. After three days, when the smell was getting very strong, they were allowed out to bury the men. The Israelis returned every day to count the people who were left in the house. Some of the soldiers let them go to their neighbour’s well to get water. One of the women was allowed to leave the house to get food for her children.
As the fighting in Gaza went on shells smashed into the UNEF headquarters building. When the fighting started UNEF peacekeepers had still been trying to pack up and get out. After first light the UNEF commander, General Rikhye, tried to get back into his badly damaged HQ to collect secret United Nations documents. He was stopped by one of the advancing Israeli tank units. Some of Rikhye’s peacekeepers were being killed. Three Indian soldiers died south of Khan Younis when they were strafed by Israeli aircraft. Five more Indians were killed and more than a dozen wounded, by IDF artillery fire later in the day.
Qalqilya
In the mountains above Qalqilya, where most of the town’s population had fled, ten-year-old Maa’rouf Zahran’s parents were frantic. Somehow, in the confusion, they had lost their nine-year-old daughter. They started moving towards Nablus, hoping that another family was looking after her. Maa’rouf was tired and hungry and frightened. And his feet hurt. Somehow, his shoes had gone missing. He walked to Nablus, like many others, barefoot.
Memdour Nufel, the young Palestinian with aspirations to be a guerrilla leader, could see the war was lost. He never fired his elderly Karl-Gustav at the Israeli tanks. He could not see the point. His mother and sister, who he had been visiting in the olive grove above the town where they were sheltering, begged him to get rid of the gun. So he smothered it in grease, wrapped it and then buried it in a cave. (In 1969 he told fighters from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine where to go to dig it up.) Before Nufel and his family joined the long trek of refugees across the mountains to Nablus, he went back into Qalqilya to collect clothes and supplies from the family’s home. His grandmother had been too weak to join the exodus to the mountains. Like many old people she had stayed in the house throughout the fighting. Nufel found her weeping and terrified. The house had been ransacked. Nothing of value was left. The old lady said the looters had been Israelis. When the Israelis took full control of the town they told people who were left to assemble at the mosque, where they found buses to take them to the river Jordan.
Fayek Abdul Mezied, the seventeen-year-old boy who had been so enthusiastic about the war, left Qalqilya with his mother, four brothers and sister and friends and neighbours. In all there were nineteen of them. ‘As we left the town it was one of the saddest and most despairing moments of my life. We were overwhelmed by a feeling of humiliation and loss. We felt there was no place for us under the sun.’
They walked up the steep path to the high ground where they thought they would be safe. Hundreds of people were dragging themselves up it. An old man close by was carrying his transistor radio. Fayek could hear Ahmed Said broadcasting from Cairo reporting huge Israeli losses and still predicting victory for the Arabs and disaster for the Jews. The old man swore and threw his radio into a cactus bush. The mountain paths were safer than the road. East of Qalqilya, near the village of Azoun, a truck full of refugees was attacked by the Israeli air force. Twelve people were killed, mostly women and children. Heavy bombing and artillery fire killed old people who could not leave and others who had refused to go. Their bodies were buried in the rubble of their destroyed homes. In all seventy-four people from Qalqilya were killed.
Sharm al Sheikh, Egypt
Red light from the setting sun was spreading out over the Red Sea. Brigadier Abdel Moneim Khalil, commander of the Egyptian paratroops at Sharm al Sheikh, stood on a low hill overlooking some of his troops’ positions. He had no idea how the war was going. The day before his regular morning helicopter from Hurgada on the other side of the Red Sea had not turned up. Nothing had been heard from Cairo. All they had to go on were the radio news reports, reporting overwhelming Egyptian successes, until on the morning of the 6th a message had arrived out of the blue from Field Marshal Amer. It said that Egyptian airfields had been hit, but gave no details. Khalil was deeply suspicious. He sensed something bad was happening, but he had no more information than his private soldiers who, like him, were listening to the radio. Khalil had deployed his men to fight an Israeli move against Sharm, but could not shake the feeling that they might have to leave in a hurry, just as Egyptian troops had had to do in 1956. He told his men to be ready to move at a moment’s notice.
He had been there with his paratroops since 19 May. Their presence at the small settlement overlooking the Straits of Tiran had caused an international crisis. Yet it had been one of the strangest deployments of Khalil’s military career. To start with, his force of 4000 men was not, he believed, suitable for the job. They were paratroops, trained to spearhead an assault, not create a remote coastal garrison. Their biggest problem was not preparing to fight Israel, but finding water. Sharm al Sheikh had none. The UNEF troops had destroyed their desalination equipment before they left. The Egyptians had nothing like that themselves, and not even any water tankers. They had to fetch water for 4000 men from an oasis 100 miles away. Driving 100 miles to fill up hundreds of jerry cans and then driving 100 miles back tied up almost all Khalil’s vehicles every day. He begged Cairo to send a him a floating water tanker. All he received, to his dismay and entirely without warning, were two American-built transport planes, flown by Saudi pilots which had landed in Sharm on 28 May. Out came several hundred Egyptian special forces, armed only with their personal weapons. Amer had sent them without telling him. All Khalil saw were more t
hirsty men who needed water he did not have.
The message from Amer ordering a withdrawal arrived just after the sun had set. Khalil called his officers together to tell them that they had to move that night to El Tour, a logistics base at an oasis where they had been collecting water every day, and then back to the west bank of the Suez canal. One of the officers, Mohamed Abd-el Hafiz, a veteran who was so badly wounded in Yemen that he needed eleven operations on his leg after a four-day evacuation on a donkey, said, ‘We were shocked, depressed and sad. The radio was still broadcasting songs of victory and big claims. One I heard said that our forces would soon be in Tel Aviv.’ Some of the officers urged Khalil not to retreat but to attack Eilat instead. They were well equipped, ready to go with naval support waiting. If the attack failed they could always pull back to Aqaba, the Jordanian port which was only a few miles from Eilat. Khalil refused. They would follow orders.
Before they could withdraw they had to dispose of fifteen thousand tons of ammunition that had been delivered by ship a few days earlier. It included the mines which were intended for the Straits of Tiran but somehow had never been laid. When they blew it up some of the soldiers thought the Israelis were attacking and panicked. Order was restored with difficulty. Brigadier Khalil was the last to leave Sharm al Sheikh, just before first light, hours after the first of his troops had gone. Because they had come into Sharm al Sheikh by air they did not have vehicles for all the men. To make matters worse, some of the trucks were away on the daily water run. His men were crammed in every available vehicle. Hafiz travelled on a jeep designed for five men that was carrying twelve and a heavy mortar. More soldiers were perched on top of another 120 mm mortar in a trailer pulled behind them. Other soldiers were clinging to three amphibious transporters that lumbered along at not much faster than walking pace. As the sun rose, Khalil hoped that the fact that his paratroopers were strung out over many miles would help them avoid the attentions of the Israeli air force, to which they were utterly exposed. A detachment of men that had been sent to the island of Tiran by helicopter was left behind. They were rescued by a fisherman who took them back to Sharm al Sheikh instead of Hurgada, on the other side of the Red Sea. Israeli forces landed in Sharm al Sheikh at 1100 on Wednesday morning. The soldiers and the fisherman were taken prisoner.
Jerusalem
Just outside Jerusalem Colonel Moshe Yotvat’s brigade took the city’s small airport without a fight. They moved towards what they thought was the road to Ramallah. Yotvat ordered an old Palestinian man to come with him in his command half-track, to show them the way. Behind them the roads were packed with Israeli troops. Caught in the traffic jam were at least a battalion of armour and a battalion of paratroopers. Yotvat was frustrated he could not get his hands on them. He pushed forward towards Ramallah with his reconnaissance company while he waited for the rest of his brigade to catch up.
Then Yotvat was badly wounded in the arm and shoulder and lost consciousness. He came round lying on the road. His first thought was that he must be dead. If this is death, he thought, it’s not too bad.
Uzi Narkiss, meanwhile, was feeling very good about what was happening. He composed an order of the day to be circulated the following morning. ‘Today Jerusalem is to be liberated. In the south and in the north the city of our ancestors is in our hands. Our army is still poised. Men of this regional command, be resolute. Do not waver.’
Israeli forces from Central Command were pushing north from Jerusalem. That evening they captured the West Bank town of Ramallah, fifteen miles north of the Old City. Uri Ben Ari was getting impatient and sent his force into the town without waiting for a bombardment to soften it up. Capturing a big town in the dark was not an easy military task. A tank battalion went first, followed by the reconnaissance company. Colonel Ben Ari said afterwards, ‘We decided to go into Ramallah with a battalion of tanks, shooting at all sides as far as possible. We crossed and recrossed the city several times and it slowly fell silent.’ They cleared out for the rest of the night. By the morning there was no resistance.
In the evening, towards midnight, there was a fierce encounter at the foot of the Mount of Olives, near the Garden of Gethsemane, the place where the Bible says Jesus sweated blood in the night before his arrest. A steep road runs up the hill past the Garden gates, just after a bridge over a dry river valley. Battalion 71 of the Israeli paratroop brigade, reinforced by tanks, were supposed to attack the heights above the Old City. But they took a wrong turning and found themselves being shot at from both sides, from Jordanians on the Mount of Olives and on the walls of the Old City, who put flares down on to the road to light up the tanks and opened up with everything they had. The commander of the lead tank was hit in the forehead. His eyes were so choked with blood that he could not see and ordered the tank behind him to take the lead.
Then for the Israelis it went from bad to worse. Soldiers in jeeps from the reconnaissance unit were cut to pieces when they tried to reach the tanks to guide them back to safety. When the tanks tried to pull out on their own, one was blown up and another crashed off a bridge. The crew inside were knocked cold but survived. During more frantic rescue operations, under heavy fire from the city walls, a medical orderly called Shindler dashed forward to get to a man who was screaming in agony as the uniform burned on his back. The wounded man was hit again and shot dead as Shindler tried to beat the flames out with his hands. Then, with more bullets slamming into the roadway around him, Shindler saved himself by jumping off the side of the bridge into the darkness. Fortunately for him the drop was not far. He escaped with a sprained ankle and scorches on his face and hands.
Micha Kapusta, the commander of the reconnaissance unit, managed to get to the bottom of the bridge where he was in dead ground and out of sight of the Jordanians. With him was Meir Har Zion, believed by many Israeli soldiers to be the apotheosis of the fighting Jew. Moshe Dayan said he was the finest Jewish warrior since Bar Kochba, the man who led the second revolt against the Romans in the second century. In the 1950s Har Zion was a close comrade of Ariel Sharon: ‘Laconically killing Arab soldiers, peasants and townspeople in a kind of fury without hatred, he remained coldblooded and thoroughly efficient, simply doing a job and doing it well, twice or three times a week for months.’ Although he had suffered lasting damage from severe wounds, including the consequences of a battlefield tracheotomy with a penknife, he was back as a volunteer with the unit he once commanded. Har Zion and Kapusta shinned up a pipe on the side of the bridge to try to get to the men they thought were trapped on it. The tank on the bridge was burning, giving off enough light for them to see three men who were lying on the bridge. They could not get near them because the tank’s ammunition was exploding and Jordanians were still firing at the bridge. Kapusta ‘crawled as close as I could and called out the names of my men. Not one responded.’
DAY THREE
7 June 1967
Jerusalem, 0030
The terrifying sound and light of battle was close enough to be seen and heard clearly in Jerusalem. Israeli artillery, tanks and air strikes were destroying a Jordanian column that was making a late and desperate attempt to climb the steep road from Jericho to Jerusalem. Jordanian soldiers and armed Palestinian civilian volunteers took it all in from their posts on the walls of the Old City. For two hours, confronted with Israel’s power, they chanted ‘Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar’, God alone is great. On the Mount of Olives more than 100 civilians, mostly Muslims, crowded into the Apostolic Delegation, the official residence of the Pope’s representative in Jerusalem. But the soldiers on the city walls were abandoned by most of their officers, who slipped away during the night. At half past midnight Brigadier Atta Ali, the Jordanian commander, went to the offices of the Waqf, the Islamic religious authority, where the Governor of Jerusalem Anwar al Khatib had set up his headquarters. The brigadier told him that nothing more could be done. The men on the walls were demoralised, hungry and exhausted. The army had given them no food since the battle for Jerusalem
started. There was only ammunition in the Old City but it was not reaching their positions. There was no resupply. On the first day of the war, Jordanian soldiers had knocked on the front door of the house of Anwar Nusseibeh, a leading Palestinian, to tell him that they had run out of ammunition. By the third day the situation was critical. Communications had broken down throughout the Jordanian army. After the first day the batteries on their radios had gone flat and were not recharged or replaced. Around Jerusalem they used ordinary telephones, which the Israelis easily intercepted, until they stopped working. In Jordanian Jerusalem there was no electricity and very little water. Most of the army had pulled back across the river Jordan to the East Bank. The governor refused to believe it was over. Surely, he asked, the people of Jerusalem could take up arms to continue the fight. If they needed officers the sons of the notable Palestinian families were available.
The brigadier was against it. ‘All you’ll be doing is destroying Jerusalem. Jerusalem will definitely be assaulted by dawn, and my troops are in no condition to resist.’ He was leaving too. He offered to escort the governor to safety. Khatib refused. ‘You are the military commander and you decide military behaviour, but Jerusalem is my adopted city and I’m not ready to leave it that way. If it is the will of God that I should die, I would not want to die anywhere else.’
Jordan’s hold over Jerusalem, which had lasted nineteen years, was slipping away. At one in the morning Jordanian NCOs came into the room to report to Atta Ali that, with the officers gone, some of their men were deserting. The brigadier told them to come back with him to their positions. He did not want several dozen Palestinian civilians who had congregated at the offices of the Waqf to hear what he was going to say next. When they were clear of the building, which is on the edge of the holy compound that encloses Jerusalem’s great mosques, he told them, discreetly, to take their men to Dung Gate in the southern wall, where they would start their journeys home. Not long afterwards Palestinian volunteers burst into the Waqf with the news that the Jordanians were leaving. Governor Khatib was so stunned that one of his aides worried he was heaving a heart attack. Some of the volunteers went back to their posts on the city walls. A few Jordanians stayed behind, to fight to the death. But throughout the night, more policemen and civilians handed in their weapons.
