Sha'ar HaGai

Sha'ar Hagai, Arabic: Bab el Wad, mutatis mutandis means gateway to the valley. With this concept a section of Highway 1, the road is called from the sea to Jerusalem. This stretch of road has played an important role in the inclusion of Jerusalem in the Palestine War.

Bab el Wad is located about two kilometers east of Latrun and is the entrance to Wadi Imam Ali, a six-kilometer long narrow gorge-like dry valley, where the road up since the 1860s leads to saris, a former Arab village at the upper end of the valley. The street was lined with rock walls and steep slopes, which made it possible to block the road with small military forces.

After the UN partition plan for Palestine and against the withdrawal of the British mandatory power, the Arabs began to lay ambushes in the Bab el Wad to combat Jewish convoys from lightly armored so-called sandwich armored car, which should supply the 100,000 Jews in Jerusalem. They tried to blow up the first vehicle with mines into the air. In the traffic jam that formed behind the wrecks on the road, they shelled the column of vehicles stuck in an ambush. In Operation Nahshon the Jews were trying to liberate the road and break through the blockade again and again. During the same period the daily British convoys of mandatory power were not bothered during the passage.

The road was the scene of many tragedies. Many drivers and armed companions lost their lives here. The armored vehicle wrecks lay there as monuments of the valor of the men and women who attempted by risking their lives to save the inhabitants of Jerusalem before starving on the roadside.

On April 20 1948 the last time a convoy managed the breakthrough to Jerusalem. From then on, the Arabs closed the road through boulders. As it the Israelis after the Declaration of Independence finally managed to expel the Arabs Bab el Wad, but no way through for convoys was possible because the British had the police station Latrun passed the withdrawal of the Arab Legion, and now the road was blocked here. Only when the Burma Road was built as a bypass of Latrun, just before the first ceasefire, Jerusalem could again be reached by vehicle on June 9, 1948.

Today the road is expanded as a four-lane highway through Bab el Wad.

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