Sha'ar HaGai
Sha'ar HaGai , Arabic: Bab el Wad , means gate to the valley . This term describes a section of Highway 1 , the road from the sea to Jerusalem . This stretch of road played an important role in the inclusion of Jerusalem in the Palestine War .
Bab el Wad is 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 has been leading up to Saris , a former Arab village at the upper end of the valley, since the 1860s . The road was lined with cliffs and steep slopes that made it possible to militarily block the road with little force.
After the UN partition plan for Palestine and before the withdrawal of the British mandate, the Arabs in Bab el Wad began setting up ambushes to combat Jewish convoys from lightly armored so-called sandwich armored vehicles that were supposed to supply the 100,000 Jews in Jerusalem. They tried to blow up the first vehicle with mines. In the traffic jam that formed on the road behind the wrecks, they shot at the stuck column of vehicles from an ambush. In Operation Nachshon , the Jews tried to clear the road and break through the blockade again and again. During the same period, the daily British convoys of the Mandate Power were not bothered in transit.
The street has been the scene of many tragedies. Many drivers and armed escorts lost their lives here. The wrecked armored vehicles remained on the roadside as memorials to the bravery of the men and women who tried their lives to save the people of Jerusalem from starvation.
On April 20, 1948, a convoy made the last breakthrough to Jerusalem. From then on the Arabs blocked the road with boulders. When the Israelis finally succeeded in driving the Arabs from Bab el Wad after the declaration of independence , convoys could not get through because the British had handed over the Latrun police station to the Arab Legion when they withdrew and the road here was now blocked. It was not until the Burma Road was built to bypass Latrun, shortly before the first armistice, that Jerusalem could be reached again by vehicle on June 9, 1948.
Today the road through Bab el Wad has four lanes as a motorway .
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Coordinates: 31 ° 48 ′ 52 ″ N , 35 ° 1 ′ 30 ″ E