Northern Samaria Communities

Northern Samaria Communities

The sequence of Jewish settlement was interrupted until the Six Day War.

On June 5, 1967, on the first day of the Six Day War, the Jordanians shelled the communities of the Jezreel Valley from the territories of the northern Shomron. The 45th Brigade under the command of Moshe Bar Kochva (Brill) was instructed to move south and stop the shelling.

The brigade managed to silence the Long Tom cannons and was ordered to conquer Jenin. While besieging the city, a force of four tanks was stationed at the Kabatia junction. This force was intended to block a Jordanian attack from the south.

The blocking force encountered dozens of Jordanian tanks advancing toward it from the south.

The fighting force began tenaciously fighting against 50 Jordanian tanks. In the morning, the rest of the brigade’s forces arrived from the direction of Jenin. In the fields of the Dotan Valley, an armored battle was fought with bloody armored combat vehicles. At the end of the day of fighting, 51 of our soldiers had been killed.

The heroic story of Gadi Rafen and Zvi Sadan who rescued wounded combatants under fire was immortalized in this song by Dalia Ravikovich which was performed by the Northern Command Band.

After the war, the fighters erected a monument in memory of the fallen, which read: “Honor and glory to the heroes with nerves of steel who consecrated the homeland in blood.” The monument was evacuated after the Oslo Accords and its tank is in the Yad Lashirion Armored Corps Museum in Latrun.