Word: quneitra
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Jerusalem Correspondent Marlin Levin crossed the Golan Heights into Syria to report on the fighting along the El Quneitra-Damascus road and narrowly missed stepping on an anti-personnel bomb. Marsh Clark temporarily left his post as New York bureau chief and returned to Jerusalem, where he headed our bureau from 1970 to 1972, to cover developments in the Israeli capital. Rounding out TIME'S coverage in the Middle East is London Correspondent William McWhirter, who has been reporting from Jordan since the day King Hussein ordered his troops to mobilize...
With a massive concentration of tanks, the Israelis lashed into the Syrian forces. The Syrians at first fell back, but then managed to counterattack and drive back into occupied territory. El Quneitra, formerly the Heights' biggest center and since '67 largely a ghost town, changed hands several times. Finally, Israeli armored units, closely supported by Phantoms and Skyhawks whooshing in to splatter napalm on the forward Syrian units, halted the Syrian drive and turned the Arabs back...
...Israeli breakthrough on the Golan forced battlefield decisions on both sides. For the Syrians, the choice was between falling back to defend Damascus or standing fast on the El Quneitra-Damascus road in an effort to halt the Israelis. For the Israelis, the decision was how far they should try to move along the road to Damascus. By week's end at least one Israeli force had penetrated more than ten miles beyond the cease-fire line set in 1967; but other Israeli troops were still meeting stiff resistance at the cease-fire lines. The Syrians were standing...
...first day, the rest of the campaign would be easy. It was. The next morning the Golani infantrymen met only token resistance as they pushed on to the Lebanese border. From its behind-the-lines stronghold at Kallah, tanks raced along undefended roads toward the Syrian headquarters at El Quneitra. In the central sector, the diversionary probes of the previous day expanded into a full-scale pincer movement that took Aalleiga, a pivotal point in the Syrian second line of defense, and then split into flying columns that sped north to El Quneitra and south to Boutmiye. In the south...
Ironically, the Syrians themselves hastened the Israeli victory. In an effort to pressure the United Nations into enforcing a ceasefire, Damascus Radio undercut its own army by broadcasting the fall of the city of El Quneitra three hours before it actually capitulated. That premature report of the surrender of their headquarters destroyed the morale of the Syrian troops left in the Golan area. Within only 27 hours, at a cost of 115 killed and 322 wounded, v. 1,000 Syrian dead, countless wounded and 600 captured, the Israelis were masters of Golan Heights. And they had added an instructive...