Six Days

by Jeremy Bowen

  Declassified IDF documents show that the operations branch of the general staff felt it necessary on 11 June, the day after the war ended, to issue new orders about the treatment of prisoners. The order read: ‘Since existing orders are contradictory, here are binding instructions. a) Soldiers and civilians who give themselves up are not to be hurt in any way. b) Soldiers and civilians who carry a weapon and do not surrender will be killed.’ The order concluded: ‘Soldiers who are caught disobeying this order by killing prisoners will be punished severely. Make sure this order is brought to the attention of all IDF soldiers.’ Meir Pail, who was General Tal’s number two in the Sinai, said men who killed prisoners or civilians were sentenced secretly by military courts and sent to prison. ‘The idea was that it is better to deal with this in the closed circle of the military.’

  An Israeli journalist called Gabby Bron, who was a reservist in the 1967 war, saw hundreds of Egyptian prisoners of war being held at the airfield at Al-Arish. On 7 June around 150 of them were in a sandbagged enclosure inside an aircraft hangar, packed in tight and sitting on the ground with their hands on the back of their necks. Next to the compound sat two Israeli soldiers at a table. They were wearing steel helmets and sunglasses, and most of their faces were covered by khaki-coloured handkerchiefs. Every few minutes, military police brought a prisoner out of the compound. Bron watched what was happening.

  ‘The POW was escorted to a distance of about 100 metres from the building and given a spade. I watched the POW digging a big pit which took about fifteen minutes. Then the policemen ordered him to throw out the spade. When he did so one of them pointed his Uzi machine gun inside the pit and shot two bursts, consisting mainly of three to four bullets each. The POW fell dead. After a few minutes another POW was escorted to the same pit, forced to go into it and also shot dead.’ An officer, a Colonel Eshel, appeared and shouted at Bron and other soldiers who were watching. When they did not move he pulled out his revolver. They moved. Later Bron was told that the soldiers at the table were identifying Palestinian fedayeen who had murdered Jews and disguised themselves as Egyptians.

  After Egypt regained Sinai as a result of the Camp David peace agreements, a number of mass graves were discovered in Sinai. Bahjat Farag, a police general, discovered a grave outside Ras Sudr hospital which contained the remains of fifteen soldiers in special forces uniforms. In Al-Arish a former prisoner called Abdel Salam Mohammed Ibrahim Moussa claimed to have buried twenty prisoners who had been shot. Human rights organisations in Egypt have collected dozens of testimonies from former soldiers and civilians which accuse the Israelis of ill-treating prisoners and shooting some of them dead. Ironically it was something the Egyptian government had never pursued. It took the publication of the Israeli stories of killing to start them looking.

  Syria–Israel border, 1130

  Colonel Albert Mendler’s armoured brigade, followed later by infantrymen from the Golani Brigade, crossed the northern end of the border into Syria near the settlement of Kfar Szold. Like every Israeli attack, the plan had been worked on, refined and perfected for years. It was helped enormously by intelligence from Eli Cohen, a Mossad agent who infiltrated the heart of the Syrian regime. He was executed in the centre of Damascus in 1965, but the damage was done. Their assault was up some of the most difficult terrain in the area. It looked nearby impassable, so the Syrians had concentrated more of their troops further south. The Israeli force had to work their way up steep, rocky slopes to get to a ridge 1500 feet above them.

  Mendler’s armour followed eight unarmoured bulldozers. They zigzagged up the slope, clearing the way for the tanks and the infantry who were following in half-tracks. The Syrians had no air cover and they faced the heaviest air attacks of the entire war. Israeli warplanes flew 1077 ground attack assaults against the Syrians, more than against Jordan and Egypt. But the Syrian bunkers were well protected, with grooves in the concrete that funnelled napalm away. The Syrian gunners kept up heavy fire, causing serious Israeli casualties. Three of the bulldozers were destroyed. All of them lost crews. Tanks were knocked out. A battalion commander was killed leading his troops. So was the second in command who replaced him.

  By all the laws of war, Syria should have stopped the Israeli assault easily. The Israeli attack was not a surprise. Jordan and Egypt had been polished off, so the Syrians knew there was a very good chance they would be next on the menu. Israel chose an uphill, frontal attack in broad daylight against well-prepared positions. They were losing vehicles and men to Syrian fire. Boulders were stopping their advance and jamming the tracks of the Israeli armour. Some vehicles slipped away backwards or sideways because the unstable slopes of gravel and basalt were so steep. Some of the Israeli forces, who had been transferred in a hurry from the Sinai, did not know the terrain and took wrong turnings. But the Israelis did not stop. Infantrymen knocked out Syrian tanks that had been buried so only their gun and their turret protruded.

  The Syrians were badly trained and badly led, though individuals fought bravely. Their most serious error was to keep their main armoured forces in reserve. Their front line defences were relatively light, supported by some tanks dug into the hillsides and some anti-tank guns. There were only a few narrow tracks up the steep sides of the escarpment, but the Israeli tanks, protected by unchallenged air power, were able to use them, in full view of the Syrians. They would have lost tanks to Israeli air attacks if they had committed them, but they might have stopped the slow Israeli advance up a treacherous and steep slope.

  Savage fighting started when the Israelis reached the first line of Syrian fortifications and stormed inside. After the battle General Elazar said that at the position of Tel Fahr ‘at the post and in the trenches there were at least sixty bodies spread about. There was hand-to-hand fighting there, fighting with fists, knives, teeth and rifle butts. The battle for the objective lasted three hours.’ Sixty Syrians were killed and twenty captured. Israel lost thirty killed and about seventy wounded. Further south, around midday, light Israeli AMX tanks crossed the border without infantry support. They took the Syrians by surprise and made rapid progress. Sloppy radio security betrayed the Syrians. When they asked for support, they disclosed the location of the tanks they hoped would come to their rescue. The Israelis, who were monitoring their radio channels, promptly found the tanks and destroyed them.

  Amman

  The Americans wanted to see how much damage the allegations of collusion with Israel had done them with King Hussein. On the streets everyone believed that Britain and the US had attacked the Arab air forces. Findley Burns, the ambassador in Amman, and Jack O’Connel, the CIA station chief, went to see the king in his palace in the afternoon. They were worried that Hussein was so ‘deeply entrapped with Nasser’ that he too would start to blame the US and Britain for the Arab defeat. But Hussein had not lost his ability to charm Westerners. They went away reassured. Hussein promised he would try to get Nasser to tone down his attacks. Better still, the king told them Nasser had asked him specifically not to break diplomatic relations with Britain and the US. Egypt wanted to keep open a channel to the West.

  Hussein’s biggest problem was the enormous influx of refugees who had fled the fighting on the West Bank. Jordan accused Israel of forcing them out. Britain tended to agree. The Israelis ‘were up to their old tricks’, going round Palestinian villages with loudspeaker trucks broadcasting that, ‘If you remain quiet you can stay here but if you want to go we will arrange safe conduct through the lines.’

  In Tulkarem on the West Bank, Israeli soldiers came knocking on the door of the house that Ghuzlan Yusuf Hamdan, a 23-year-old Palestinian woman, shared with her family. When the war started they had been determined not to leave their home, which was less than a mile from the border with Israel. Fifty relations and neighbours gathered together in the three strongest-looking houses in their district, ‘the old men in one house, the young men in another, and the women and children were in the third house … We stayed like this for three day
s, in one night the firing didn’t stop, children were sick and women were tired but we all helped each other.’ Like all Palestinians, they thought of the massacre at Deir Yassin in 1948 when the Israeli tanks and helicopters were close: ‘The earth shook like an earthquake, we were lying on the ground and we wouldn’t dare lift our heads up and look out the window because we were afraid we would be hit. Those were the most frightening moments of my life because I was afraid they would come in and kill us indiscriminately. We weren’t armed. We turned on the radio to listen to the Israeli station and there was an announcement ordering us to put out white flags and surrender. So we did.’

  That Friday morning the Israelis who were banging on their door came into the house and ordered the family to come with them to the town centre. ‘Each one of them was carrying a machine gun and hand grenades, so we got out and when we arrived we found it packed with people. On the rooftops there were Israeli soldiers carrying weapons. No one dared say a word because they were afraid.’

  Ghuzlan Yusuf Hamdan and her family, like hundreds of others, were thoroughly intimidated. They did not protest when Israeli soldiers loaded them on to buses. She managed to persuade one of them to let her go home to grab a suitcase with a few things. Everything else was left behind. The buses took them to the river Jordan, where they arrived between three and four in the afternoon. ‘An Israeli soldier told us not to stay by the bridge because Israeli war planes might launch an air raid. So we had to cross but the bridge was blown up and parts of it had sunk in the water, so we had to climb across. I remember seeing a family where the young men were carrying their grandmother on a blanket. We saw people from wealthy families in a very poor state … It was desperate. Lots of people were walking around the country looking for relatives who got lost along the way.’

  Refugees were pouring over from the West Bank after the ceasefire. A French television journalist described ‘terrible scenes of thousands of refugees fording the river Jordan with their livestock under the indifferent eyes of the Israeli soldiers and without any evidence that the Jordanian authorities were doing anything to cope with the disaster’. No Jordanian officials were trying to help them. Sightseers in cars from Amman were gawping at the spectacle alongside other Jordanians who had driven down to the river to look for information about relatives on the West Bank. The refugees were in ‘appalling’ condition, ‘at the end of their tether’. When the journalist went with Jordanian officials to the camp at Zerka, which housed 5000 refugees with very poor facilities, they had to be protected by a ‘very large’ military guard. ‘The refugees hurled insults at them and appeared extremely excitable.’

  The Jordanian authorities were overwhelmed and their first instinct was to keep foreigners away. But Mary Hawkins of Save the Children knew the Jordanian director of public security. She persuaded him to let her travel to the edge of the Syrian desert, to a place called Wadi Dhuleil. Five thousand refugees were there in a miserable state, with hundreds more arriving every day. She went to work immediately. Refugees ‘pour in daily faster than the tents can be erected and there are always pathetic little groups of people camping under the cruel sun and sleeping in the cold desert night with the heavy dew’. Babies of less than a week old, born on the journey from the West Bank, were lying in the open. Hawkins called them ‘children of the dust … Five days out of seven the wind starts at about 10.00 a.m. and blows till evening. The dust chokes and blinds the refugees and the workers … all the time it is in one’s food, water, clothes hair and bedding … one man said to me, “My children are eating dust all the time.”’

  Most people had no way to cook. On the worst days there was only a single water tanker for the refugees. The police – who had set up the camp – had to use force to keep the desperate refugees back when Hawkins and her team wanted to get water from the tankers to mix powdered milk for the children. More and more arrived until there were between 14,000 and 15,000 refugees there. They were filthy and starving. The camp had no sanitation and most of the refugees had dysentery or worms. Human faeces were everywhere and so were millions of flies. Hawkins managed to get her hands on some clothes, shoes, soap, blankets, water containers, cups, washing bowls and hurricane lamps. But there were not enough: ‘It is almost impossible to make any kind of distribution without a riot.’ A month later she reported that, ‘after 30 days of living and working in this hell, it seems like a timeless nightmare’. Remembering the camps in 1948, with deep mud and uncovered latrines in which children sometimes drowned, she felt ‘the greatest apprehension about the fate of these refugees during the coming winter’.

  One of the best UNRWA camps was at Suf. It was still grossly overcrowded. Even by late July, 12,500 people were living there. Most of the refugees were peasant farmers, who are usually tough and resourceful with well-developed survival skills, unlike the middle classes, who often die first in refugee camps. The peasant refugees at Suf improvised ovens, built mud walls round their tents, and used camel thorn to rig up shelters against the brutal sun. They had brought goats, sheep and chickens from the West Bank, which grazed and picked around the tents. But the latrines were completely inadequate for so many people, and the medical centre had only two doctors and four nurses. They were overworked, mainly because so many children had malnutrition.

  Any Arabs who tuned into the radio news from Cairo could still persuade themselves that nothing was going wrong. Kuwait, which had sent troops to Egypt, refused to accept a ceasefire. ‘I suppose all Arabs live in a dream world,’ commented G. C. Arthur, Britain’s man in Kuwait wearily, ‘but the inhabitants of Kuwait seem further removed from reality than most just now. They and their brethren are still winning great victories over the Zionist gangs … what I fear most now is the delayed shock of reality … the whale is at its most dangerous when it whips its tail before expiring.’

  Syria–Israel border, 1630

  It was time for the Israelis to let the Americans know what was happening. The Israeli foreign ministry told them that the time had come ‘to weed out the people who have been shelling our settlements for the last two years. This effort is now under way and is proceeding satisfactorily.’ But it was taking longer than expected. The Syrians were still fighting despite an intensive air bombardment from the Israeli air force. Brigadier General Hod recalled: ‘We attacked with everything we had … we dropped rockets, bombs and napalm.’ When Israeli soldiers were airlifted on to the Syrian positions in the southern sector, they found a shell-shocked Syrian gunner still sitting at the controls of his anti-aircraft gun. All he could say was ‘aircraft, aircraft’.

  Syrian soldiers were weak because their officers were too busy with politics to train them properly. Before the war a small group of Soviet advisers did their best to fill in the gaps, but without officers that wanted to listen and take part, and without the creation of a solid core of NCOs, the Syrians had no chance. Some of the Soviet advisers were very close to the fighting. In some of the captured bunkers Israeli soldiers found a copy of one of Balzac’s works, translated into Russian.

  As darkness fell casualties were still scattered around the steep slopes of the heights. An Israeli doctor called Yitzhak Glick, who had been treating the wounded all day, found six injured men next to a couple of knocked-out tanks. One of them was in a critical condition. ‘I worked on him by torchlight for almost an hour. I tried artificial respiration, put an injection direct into his heart, did external massage. The others walked around and said: “Just half an hour ago he was talking, still telling us all kinds of things.” They had the feeling that I had arrived too late, that they had been abandoned. When I told them [he was dead] they cried … there was also a terrible feeling of isolation – we were alone in the world. It was quiet and completely dark.’

  By the evening Israeli troops were outside Kuneitra, the main town in the Golan, fifteen miles inside Syria and only forty miles from Damascus.

  Jerusalem

  For 3000 years Jerusalem has been looted by its conquerors. The Israeli arm
y was following in an ancient tradition. Holy places were protected by the new occupiers and in most cases escaped unscathed. But a huge amount of private property was removed. As the front-line combat troops moved out, systematic looting of Palestinian and Jordanian property in the newly occupied territories began. During the fighting a Catholic nun called Sister Marie-Therese treated the wounded in a convent on the Via Dolorosa in the Old City. After Jerusalem fell a sympathetic Israeli officer gave her a permit to move freely in Jerusalem and the West Bank to do humanitarian work. ‘It is necessary to state unambiguously that the first wave of Israeli soldiers were decent, humane and courageous, doing as little damage as possible,’ she wrote after the war. ‘The second wave was made up of thieves, looters, and sometimes killers, and the third was even more disturbing since it seemed to act from a resolute desire for systematic destruction.’

  Major-General Chaim Herzog, who was appointed Israeli governor of the West Bank, was deeply concerned about the chaos that followed the withdrawal of the paratroopers and their replacement by reservists from the Jerusalem Brigade. ‘There was no order or discipline. All the wives and sweethearts were allowed to roam around the area. All of Jerusalem was coming in, destroying and looting.’ Herzog complained and was given the security detail from the Israeli parliament to try to stop it. Various orders were issued to stop the looting, but they were widely ignored. Some of the fighting units did not like what the rear-echelon troops were doing. Paratroopers who were sitting on the walls of the Old City waiting to be relieved saw Israeli soldiers with sacks on their backs moving about the Arab village below them. ‘I took a rifle from one of the boys and began shooting, not at them, but just in front of them. They got a terrific shock. We shouted down: “Bring everything you’ve got!” So they emptied the sacks by the wall, and we shot again – just missing their hands – and they scuttled back to their camp.’ Another combat soldier was shocked, when he came into the village in the West Bank where his unit had based itself, to find ‘the storemen and cooks – all that lot – absolutely rolling in things that they’d looted from the village. Wrapped up in carpets, women’s jewellery – it was a horrible scene.’ His commander, who was religious, read the looters passages from the Bible prohibiting what they had done.