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1967 and the Beginning of Occupation: How the Six-Day War Created Today’s West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem

In June 1967, in six days of fighting, Israel occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai Peninsula. Sinai was returned to Egypt in 1982. The Golan was unilaterally annexed in 1981 and is held under international protest. The West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza remain — fifty-eight years later — under a regime of occupation whose legal architecture, military orders, and settlement geography all trace, line by line, to that summer.

This is the foundational fact of contemporary Palestinian life. Every checkpoint, every settlement, every demolition order, every closure of a Jerusalem neighbourhood, every blockade of Gaza, every “administrative detention” of a Palestinian — all of it operates under a body of law and a political reality created in June 1967. Understanding the present requires understanding what happened then.

This piece traces what the Six-Day War did to Palestine: the Naksa (the Setback) of mass Palestinian displacement, the immediate annexation of East Jerusalem, the imposition of military rule across the newly occupied territories, the start of the settlement project, and the international legal framework that has — to this day — never been honoured.

The Pre-1967 Map

Between 1949 and 1967, historic Palestine was divided three ways. Israel held 78% of the land — the area within the 1949 armistice lines (the “Green Line”). The West Bank, including East Jerusalem, was administered by Jordan, which had unilaterally annexed it in 1950. The Gaza Strip was under Egyptian administration but never annexed; it was governed by an Egyptian military administrator, with Palestinians receiving Egyptian travel documents but not citizenship.

For the more than 750,000 Palestinians displaced in 1948 — and their descendants — life was lived in refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the Egyptian-administered Gaza Strip, and the Jordanian-administered West Bank. UNRWA, established in December 1949, was the institutional response to a refugee crisis that the United Nations had committed to resolving via Resolution 194 (the right of return) but never did.

This was the map the Six-Day War would shatter.

The War Itself: Six Days in June

On 5 June 1967, Israel launched Operation Focus, a pre-dawn airstrike that destroyed most of Egypt’s air force on the ground. Within hours the Egyptian military’s offensive capacity was crippled. By 7 June, Israeli ground forces had reached the Suez Canal and taken the Sinai Peninsula. The same day, Israeli forces entered the Old City of Jerusalem after intense fighting; by 8 June they had occupied the entire West Bank. On 9–10 June Israel took the Golan Heights from Syria.

The war’s military narrative is well documented and largely uncontested. What is contested — heavily and along political lines — is the strategic intent behind the war. The dominant Israeli framing has been that Israel faced existential threat (Egyptian troop concentrations in Sinai, the closure of the Straits of Tiran, hostile rhetoric from Nasser) and acted in pre-emptive self-defence. Revisionist historians, drawing on Israeli archives released decades later — including memoirs and documents cited by Israeli historian Tom Segev in 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year that Transformed the Middle East (Metropolitan Books, 2007) — have documented internal Israeli assessments at the time that did not view the threat as existential, and have shown a long-running Israeli interest in territorial expansion that pre-dated the immediate crisis.

The legal and human consequences for Palestinians, which are this article’s focus, do not depend on resolving that historiographical debate.

The Naksa: Palestinian Displacement in 1967

The 1967 war produced a second mass displacement of Palestinians, second only to the Nakba of 1948. Palestinians call it the Naksa — the Setback.

UNRWA records that approximately 300,000 Palestinians were displaced from the West Bank and Gaza in June 1967, with around half of them being second-time refugees — people who had been displaced as children in 1948 and were now displaced again. The town of Qalqilya was largely destroyed by bulldozer in the days after Israeli forces took it; thousands of its residents were pushed across the Jordan River. The villages of Imwas, Yalu, and Bayt Nuba in the Latrun salient were demolished and their populations expelled to make way for a buffer zone; the area is today the site of a recreational park.

B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organisation, has documented that Israeli authorities prevented the return of those displaced in 1967, in defiance of UN Security Council Resolution 237 (June 1967), which called for “the safe and rapid return of those inhabitants who have fled the areas since the outbreak of hostilities.”

By the end of 1967, the Palestinian refugee population — already including the displaced of 1948 and their descendants — had grown by hundreds of thousands. UNRWA’s mandate, originally conceived as temporary, was extended and remains in place to this day, supporting more than five million registered refugees.

The Annexation of East Jerusalem

Within three weeks of the ceasefire, on 27–28 June 1967, the Israeli Knesset passed legislation extending Israeli law to East Jerusalem and dramatically expanding the city’s municipal boundaries. The official Israeli framing was an “extension of municipal jurisdiction”; in legal and political substance, it was annexation.

The international response was unanimous. UN Security Council Resolution 252 (21 May 1968) declared the measures “invalid” and called on Israel to rescind them. UN Security Council Resolution 478 (20 August 1980), passed after Israel formalised the annexation through the Basic Law: Jerusalem, declared the Basic Law “null and void” and called on member states to withdraw their diplomatic missions from the city. The resolution passed 14–0 with the United States abstaining.

The annexation has never been recognised by any state other than Israel — until 2018, when the Trump administration moved the United States embassy to Jerusalem (without explicitly endorsing the annexation), followed by Guatemala, Honduras, and a small number of others. The European Union, the United Kingdom, the United Nations, and the overwhelming majority of states maintain that East Jerusalem is occupied territory under international law, and that any unilateral changes — including the annexation — are without legal force.

For Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, the annexation produced a unique and precarious legal status. They were classified as “permanent residents” of Israel, not citizens — a status revocable at the discretion of the Interior Ministry. Since 1967, Israel has revoked the residency of more than 14,500 Palestinian Jerusalemites (B’Tselem and HaMoked, The Quiet Deportation; Israeli Ministry of Interior data via HaMoked). Loss of residency means loss of the right to live in the city of one’s birth.

Military Rule in the West Bank and Gaza

While East Jerusalem was annexed under Israeli civil law, the rest of the occupied territories were placed under military administration. This is a critical legal distinction. Israeli citizens — including, eventually, Israeli settlers — would live under Israeli civil law. Palestinians in the same territory would live under military orders.

This dual-legal regime is the foundation of the apartheid finding later reached, on the basis of decades of evidence, by B’Tselem (January 2021), Human Rights Watch (April 2021), and Amnesty International (February 2022). Two populations, sharing the same land, governed by separate and unequal legal systems based on ethnicity and nationality.

The first military order was issued on 7 June 1967 — the day Israeli forces completed the occupation of the West Bank — declaring that the area was now under the authority of the Israel Defense Forces. By the end of 1967, hundreds of military orders had been issued, regulating Palestinian movement, assembly, speech, agriculture, water use, building, and political activity. By the time of writing, more than 1,800 military orders have been issued, the bulk of them still in force.

Notable orders include:

For Israeli settlers living in the same territory, the applicable law is Israeli civil and criminal law, applied extraterritorially. Two systems of law, two systems of courts, two systems of policing — in the same physical space.

The Beginning of the Settlement Project

Within months of the war, Israel began establishing settlements in the newly occupied territories.

Kfar Etzion — re-established in late September 1967 in the West Bank — is widely cited as the first West Bank settlement, though earlier military outposts had already been set up in the Jordan Valley. By the end of 1967, kibbutz Merom Golan had been founded in the Golan Heights. By 1970, settlements had been founded in the Jordan Valley, Hebron (where the Jewish settlement was re-established at the heart of the Palestinian city), Gush Etzion, and around East Jerusalem.

The legal framework for settlement was constructed step by step. Government decisions, military orders re-classifying Palestinian land as “state land” or “security zone”, and the eventual extension of services and protection to settlers all combined to make settlement a deliberate state project — not, as is sometimes claimed, the work of fringe ideologues acting against government wishes.

The numbers tell the story:

(Figures: Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics; Peace Now Settlement Watch; B’Tselem.)

The legal status is unambiguous. Geneva Convention IV, Article 49(6), prohibits an occupying power from transferring “parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” The International Committee of the Red Cross — the formal guardian of the Geneva Conventions — has repeatedly affirmed this prohibition applies to Israeli settlements. The UN Security Council reaffirmed it in Resolution 2334 (December 2016), which “demands that Israel immediately and completely cease all settlement activities” and described settlements as having “no legal validity.” The resolution passed 14–0; the United States abstained for the first time on settlements.

In July 2024, the International Court of Justice issued its advisory opinion in Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, finding that the occupation as a whole — and the settlement enterprise — is unlawful, and that Israel is under an obligation to withdraw and to provide reparations.

The political response of successive Israeli governments has been to ignore these findings. The legal record nonetheless speaks clearly.

UN Security Council Resolution 242

On 22 November 1967, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 242, the text that has framed every subsequent diplomatic process. It calls for:

The phrasing “from territories” — without “the” or “all” before “territories” in the English text — has been the subject of fifty-eight years of legal-political dispute. Israeli governments have argued the indefinite article allows partial withdrawal; Arab states, the Soviet bloc (whose drafting preferences shaped the French text, which uses “des territoires”), and most international legal scholarship have read the resolution as requiring full withdrawal in the context of a comprehensive peace.

What is uncontested is what the resolution did not do. It did not endorse Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem. It did not authorise the establishment of settlements. It did not extinguish the right of return enshrined in UNGA Resolution 194. The “land for peace” formula at the heart of every subsequent peace effort — from the Camp David Accords to Oslo to the Arab Peace Initiative — has its formal legal basis in 242.

Despite that, the territory has not been returned. The settlements have multiplied. The right of return has been refused.

The Khartoum Conference and the “Three Nos”

In September 1967, Arab heads of state met in Khartoum and issued a resolution rejecting recognition of Israel, peace with Israel, and negotiations with Israel — the “three nos” frequently cited in standard Israeli and Western histories as evidence that there was no Arab partner for peace.

The contemporary record is more complicated than that summary suggests. The conference also reflected divisions, in particular between Egypt’s President Nasser, who privately accepted that diplomatic engagement would be necessary, and Saudi and Algerian leaders who maintained a harder line. Within years, Egypt under Sadat (1977 visit to Jerusalem; 1979 peace treaty) and Jordan (1994 peace treaty) had moved to bilateral peace with Israel. The “three nos” were not, in the medium term, Arab policy.

What is more usefully noted from Khartoum is the structural mismatch the conference reveals: the negotiations Israel later prioritised were state-to-state, conducted with Egypt and Jordan, in which the Palestinian question was treated as a technical sub-issue. Palestinian self-determination, the right of return, and East Jerusalem received little serious attention from any side until the rise of the PLO and the Palestinian national movement in the 1970s and 1980s.

How 1967 Made Today’s Map

Every contemporary feature of the Israeli-Palestinian relationship can be traced, line by line, to the framework established in 1967.

The “1967 lines” — the borders that existed before the war — have served, for fifty-eight years, as the international reference point for any two-state framework. Their durability in international law is striking. Their meaning on the ground has eroded steadily — Area C settlement geography, the wall, the closure of East Jerusalem, the de-development of Gaza — to the point where many Palestinian and international analysts now ask whether the two-state framework is a serious option or a diplomatic fiction maintained for the convenience of the parties uninterested in either two states or one.

What Has Not Happened in Fifty-Eight Years

The most important sentence about 1967 is the one that describes the present.

Israel has not withdrawn from the territories it occupied in 1967. Settlements continue to expand, in defiance of the Geneva Conventions, repeated UN resolutions, and the 2024 ICJ advisory opinion. East Jerusalem remains under annexation, recognised as such by no major power except Israel itself. Gaza remains under siege. The Palestinian refugees of 1948 and 1967 — and their descendants — have not returned.

The phrase “Six-Day War” suggests an event that ended on 11 June 1967, when the last ceasefire took hold. For Palestinians, the war is the framework of their lives. The first Israeli military orders are still in force. The first settlements still stand and have grown into cities. The first revocations of Jerusalem residency have been followed by thousands more.

A war is over when the soldiers go home. An occupation is something else.

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