MIDDLE EAST: The Battle of El Auja

The sound of clash and the rumor of war rumbled through the Middle East. Would the Israelis—1,500,000 people ringed around by 40 million Arab enemies —attack before the Egyptians could use the shiploads of arms the Communists had sold them? Last week the Israelis struck the bloodiest blow since the 1949 armistice. But what at first looked like the beginning of the worst turned out at week's end to be not a preventive war but one quick, calculated ounce of prevention.

For weeks guns have been going off around El Auja, the sun-blasted crossroads on the rocky southern route which may have been Joseph, Mary and the Christ child's on their flight into Egypt. Since 1949 the 100-sq.-mi. demilitarized zone created under the U.N. armistice has bulged like a blister into Israel's Negev desert holdings. In recent weeks Canadian Major General Edson L.M. Burns, the U.N. truce supervisor., has repeatedly warned the Egyptians to stop putting up "check points" inside the zone. The Israelis chose this area to attack.

Under Cover of Oratory. From the top down, the Israelis took special trouble to achieve maximum surprise. That morning David Ben-Gurion, the aging (68) lion of Judah who led the nation to victory in the 1948 war, went before the Knesset in Jerusalem as Israel's Premier-designate. Returning to office with a makeshift majority including both left-wing freethinkers and hardshell Sabbatarians, Ben-Gurion looked rumpled and tired. He made his speech sitting down, paused frequently, and once asked the indulgence of the house while he rested. "I am prepared," he said, "to meet with the Prime Minister of Egypt and with every other Arab ruler as soon as possible in order to achieve a mutual settlement without any prior conditions."

Just twelve hours later some 1,000 Israeli troops, their faces blackened against the bright moonlight, bounced south by truck past the El Auja crossroads. Their target was an Egyptian outpost that was set on the lower slopes of an Egyptian hill but inside the demilitarized Israeli territory. A network of trenches, gun emplacements and barbed-wire barricades linked the forward post with stronger Egyptian positions around the hilltop.

A jackal howled as the Israeli troops fanned out to feint at the Egyptian flanks. As a flare burst over the 1,400-ft. hilltop, the Jewish infantry crawled past boulders to the attack. It was a hand-to-hand bayonet fight. The Egyptians resisted fiercely, and the hilltop did not fall until past midnight. By that time an Egyptian battalion spearheaded by eight tanks rolled up from the rear to counterattack. The Israelis said they knocked out two tanks before withdrawing downhill and into their own territory. They listed five dead, 18 wounded. They claimed 50 Egyptians killed, 49 taken prisoner.