Operation Focus: Aerial Operations on the First Day of the Six Day War
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Abstract
The 1967 Six Day War (also referred to as the III. Arab-Israeli War or the 1967 June War) started with a decisive series of aerial strikes. The conflict was practically decided on the very first day with the carefully planned and executed Operation Focus, during which the Israeli Air Force achieved air superiority for the rest of the whole war. It is worth to reexamine the Operation, as there is still no peace in the region and aftereffects of the Six Day War can still be felt in the Middle East today. In the first part of this article, the aim is to show the strategic reasons behind the blitzkrieg war plan, and subsequent sections contain the detail analysis of the actual execution of Operation Focus, as well as all air operations on the first day of the Six Day War.