Commonly referred to by Palestinians as the June War or Al-Naksa (Arabic for "the setback"), and by Israelis as the Six-Day War. Tensions, which had been escalating for months, sharpened on May 13, 1967, when the Soviet Union gave false intelligence reports to Syria (who told Egypt) that
Israel was planning an attack on Syria for their support of
Palestinian guerillas and was amassing troops on the Syrian border. Egyptian President
Gamal Abdul Nasser deployed Egyptian troops to the
Sinai Peninsula and demanded the removal of the United Nations troops there, who obliged and left. On May 22, Nasser closed the Straits of Tiran to
Israeli ships. The war began in the early morning of June 5, 1967, when the Israeli air force preemptively attacked and destroyed most of the Egyptian air force while still on the ground, launching a simultaneous ground invasion in Gaza and into the Sinai Peninsula. Jordan and Syria began attacking that day, but were quickly rebuffed. The war lasted six days, during which Israel captured the
Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the
Golan Heights from Syria and the
West Bank (including
East Jerusalem) from Jordan. Israel annexed the Golan Heights and eventually returned the Sinai Peninsula in a peace deal with Egypt. The war resulted in hundreds of thousands of new Palestinian refugees, and the start of Israel's military occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, which continues until today. See "
Six Day War," Encyclopedia Britannica. See also "
Six days of war, 40 years of failure," Ian Black, The Guardian, June 4, 2007.