At a quarter to eight on the morning of 5 June 1967, Egyptian air-defence officers were changing shifts, the dawn patrol had landed, and hundreds of Soviet-built fighters sat parked in neat rows across eighteen airfields. Within roughly three hours, most of them were burning. The Six-Day War was decided before many Egyptian pilots had finished breakfast, and it was decided in the air.

The Israeli plan was called Moked — Focus — and it remains the textbook example of what happens when one air force catches another on the ground.

The Sixteen-Year Rehearsal

Focus worked because almost nothing about it was left to chance. Israeli planners had studied Egyptian habits for years: when the dawn patrols landed, when senior officers commuted, when the morning fog over the Nile Delta lifted. They chose 07:45 precisely because it was the seam in the Egyptian day — late enough that the early patrols were down and refuelling, early enough that the airfields were not yet at full alert.

The strike packages flew out over the Mediterranean at wave-top height, below Egyptian radar, maintaining radio silence, then turned south to come in from the sea. When the IAF commander was later asked to explain the operation’s success, his answer was disarmingly short.

“If one will ask me what was the thing that made it so successful, I would answer it in one word: simplicity.”

Maj. Gen. Mordechai Hod — Commander, Israeli Air Force, 1967

Period footage of the Israeli Air Force during the 1967 strikes.

Two Hundred Aircraft Before the Egyptians Could React

The first wave hit ten Egyptian bases almost simultaneously. Specialised bombs cratered the runways first, trapping any aircraft that might have scrambled, and then the fighters returned in strafing passes to destroy the parked rows with cannon fire. Roughly two hundred Egyptian aircraft were wrecked in that opening wave alone.

What made it relentless was the turnaround. Israeli ground crews refuelled and re-armed returning jets in as little as seven and a half minutes, sending the same aircraft back for a second and third strike. The whole force behaved less like an air raid than a machine.

Then Jordan, Syria and Iraq

When Jordan, Syria and Iraq entered the war that afternoon, the Israeli Air Force simply widened the target list. By nightfall it had struck all four Arab air forces, destroying about 452 aircraft across the day for the loss of 19 of its own in the first wave. Egypt lost the majority; Jordan’s small air force was annihilated entirely.

The consequence was total air supremacy. For the rest of the war, Israeli ground columns in the Sinai, the West Bank and the Golan advanced under a sky they owned, while Arab armies moved — and were bombed — in the open.

A detailed breakdown of the first day of the war and the Focus strike.

Why It Still Matters

Focus is studied everywhere because it distilled a hard truth: air power is most decisive not in dogfights but in the first ninety minutes, against an enemy that has not yet left the ground. It was also a colossal gamble — Hod committed almost every serviceable jet Israel owned, leaving barely a dozen to defend the country’s cities. Had the intelligence been wrong, the outcome could have been catastrophic.

It was not wrong. And in the decades since, every air force planning a first strike — and every air force fearing one — has measured itself against the morning the Israeli Air Force won a war before lunch.

A modern analysis of why Operation Focus remains one of history’s most successful air campaigns.

Sources: CBN News; Imperial War Museums; Simon Dunstan, The Six Day War 1967: Sinai; Israeli Air Force records.