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1967 Six-Day War and Territorial Occupation

1967 · Middle East & North Africa

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What happened

In the June 1967 war, Israel decisively defeated Egypt, Jordan, and Syria and occupied the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights. Some 300,000–430,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from the West Bank and Gaza to Jordan and elsewhere, many of them refugees for a second time since 1948, while up to 130,000 Syrians left the Golan Heights, whose population fell from around 130,000 to a few thousand. UN Security Council Resolution 242 subsequently called for Israeli withdrawal from territories occupied in the conflict in exchange for peace, a formula not fully implemented. Sinai was later returned to Egypt (1982), while the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights remain, in whole or part, under Israeli control or occupation.

Parties

Israel fought Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, capturing the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip from Egypt, the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) from Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria in six days of fighting.

Disputed

The denominator

Prewar estimates put the West Bank at roughly 850,000 (Jordanian figures), Gaza at about 400,000 (Egyptian administration), the Golan at around 130,000 and the inhabited parts of Sinai at 30,000-50,000, giving about 1.4 million. The Israeli census conducted in September 1967 counted only 595,900 in the West Bank, 380,800 in Gaza and about 6,400 remaining on the Golan, the difference reflecting how many had already fled or been expelled.

Where the baseline comes from

• Six-Day War — Wikipediaopen-edited
• 1967 Palestinian exodus — Wikipediaopen-edited

On the death toll

Israeli official figures give 776-983 Israeli dead; Egyptian dead are estimated at 9,800-15,000 (the widest uncertainty, since Egypt's own accounting of losses in Sinai was incomplete and Israeli and Egyptian sources differ sharply), with roughly 700 Jordanian and 1,000-2,500 Syrian dead, plus 34 US sailors on the USS Liberty and 15 UN peacekeepers. The war also displaced an estimated 280,000-325,000 Palestinians from the West Bank and about 100,000 Syrians from the Golan.

Documented forms of violence

Israeli historians including Tom Segev, together with contemporaneous ICRC and UN reporting, documented the demolition of the Mughrabi Quarter beside the Western Wall in June 1967 and of the Latrun-area villages of Imwas, Yalu and Bayt Nuba, whose inhabitants were not permitted to return.

Movements mapped

• West Bank → Jordan250,000
• Golan Heights → Syria100,000
• Sinai (Egyptian residents/military) → Egypt15,000

Countries touched, on present-day borders

Palestine, Jordan, Israel, Syria, Egypt

Related entries

• Overlaps with: UNRWA Refugee Camps and Protracted Palestinian Statelessness
  About 145,000 of the Palestinians displaced in 1967 were 1948 refugees uprooted a second time and are also counted among UNRWA-registered refugees. 145,000 people are counted in both entries.

Sources

• Britannica: Six-Day Warreference
• 1967 Palestinian exodusopen-edited
• Palquest: June 1967 Warpress