The Israeli narrative justifying the ongoing genocide in Gaza since October 2023 rests on an argument pertaining to self-defence following the Palestinian attack on 7 October that year.
In this argument, every Israeli aggression against the Palestinians is presented by implication as devoid of historical context.
As no amount of evidence-based rebuttal by the Palestinians has been successful in influencing this narrative, it is also unlikely that the recently published Israeli testimonies of the atrocities committed against the Arabs in the 1967 War will either.
The revelations, well-known to Palestinians and Arabs who witnessed the war, were largely kept from the Israeli public whose collective memory of the Six Day War evokes national pride in the swift defeat of several Arab states.
Israel’s occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Syria’s Golan Heights, and Egypt’s Sinai is remembered as a necessary defensive campaign.
The then forced displacement of over 300,000 Palestinians, approximately one third of the population at the time, is perceived as a consequence of warfare and panic rather than deliberate mass expulsion and calculated ethnic cleansing.
However, a historical inquiry published by the left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz on 4 June this year has now attempted to challenge the country’s romanticised version of the 1967 War on its 59th anniversary.
The investigation by Israeli historian and human-rights researcher Adam Raz discloses previously unpublished testimonies by Israeli soldiers who fought in the war and paints a sordid picture of the atrocities.
From ethnic cleansing and the mass killings of women, children, and civilians to looting and destruction: the details echo the Israeli Occupation Forces’ (IOF) actions in Gaza since 2023, 56 years before the 7 October 2023 attacks.
In the words of the Israeli soldiers, they were instructed to open fire without prior warning at any Palestinians, even women and children, who attempted to return home from Jordan to the West Bank in the weeks after the war.
The soldiers would wait until the morning to scan the area for anyone who was still alive, “including those hiding and the wounded. After the killing was over, we would cover the bodies with dirt until a tractor arrived,” an IOF soldier said.
“They explained to us that if convoys of refugees returning from Jordan to the West Bank passed by us, we had to shoot them,” another soldier testified. “I asked the officer, ‘and if I hear babies crying, should I shoot them too?’ The answer I received was ‘don’t be a girl,’” he said.
Another soldier recounted how a “Jordanian boy” stood for a long time by the side of the road in a group until soldiers “sprayed him with bullets and told me with complete enthusiasm that they had finished them off.”
A participant explained that regular IOF soldiers, more so than reservists, had killed Palestinians with ease. “They carried out actual murders, shot prisoners even when they had their hands up,” he said, adding that he was present at the execution of “some 15 guys” who were unarmed.
The IOF soldiers were explicitly instructed to execute Palestinian captives.
In many cases, the executions were not implemented as a result of instructions from the chain of command, but as “sport” by IOF soldiers. One incident cited in the testimonies alludes to killing seven civilians on a sailboat just because they were Arabs.
The IOF soldiers said they turned Sinai into a “killing field”, executing both unarmed soldiers and civilians. In most cases, the execution orders were given by Moshe Levy, a staff officer in the Israeli Paratroopers who was later appointed chief of staff.
Raz, the author of the expose, procured the testimonies from discussions that took place after the war that are housed in Yad Tabenkin, the public archive of the Israeli kibbutz movement.
Best known for his book Loot: How Israel Stole Palestinian Property, Raz has published several books on the forced expulsion of the Palestinians after 1948.
The testimonies from 1967 demonstrate how the IOF’s ongoing genocide in Gaza is consistent with Israel’s war doctrine and the entrenched dehumanisation of the Palestinians since 1947.
“At first, I wasn’t willing to execute Arabs who weren’t resisting,” one soldier said. “Then we came to the conclusion that we had to kill. We went through the process of ceasing to see them as human beings.”
A second soldier explained that in 1967, “human lives didn’t matter. You could kill; there was no law. No one would say a word to you.”
We would roam through refugee camps in Gaza and carry out purges, another soldier testified. “Every man we saw was a combatant, that’s clear. No way to prove it. Maybe prisoners or civilians were the ones that were killed. Every soldier who was there created a ‘concentration camp,’ and they didn’t hesitate to kill people who caused a slight disturbance.”
Just like today, the mass expulsion of the Palestinians in 1967 was followed by state-run systematic looting and destruction. Arab communities along the Green Line were destroyed to blur the border between Israel and Jordan, Raz wrote.
In the Golan Heights 120,000 Syrians were forcibly displaced and never allowed to return to what remains Israeli-occupied Syrian territory.
Israel’s 1967 land grab in Palestine, Syria, and Egypt, Raza revealed, was not an unintended consequence of the war, but instead was predated in meticulous preparations carried out since the early 1960s, according to documents opened for review in archives in recent years.
The systematic mass explusion and population transfer of 1967 was planned, according to the testimony of Ishai Amrami, deputy commander of a battalion that experienced it at “first hand”.
What happened was an attempt at massive population transfer, in the words of Amrami. “Not a simple expulsion like that, but transportation by buses. This is something that remains etched in my memory to this very day,” he said.
The expulsions across multiple towns and villages in the West Bank forced tens of thousands of Palestinians to settle in Gaza. They settled in makeshift infrastructure with United Nations assistance and in squalid and overcrowded conditions.
Their children’s generation would grow up in the 1980s to carry arms against the Israeli occupation.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 11 June, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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