The Americans, for their part, were also not interested in escalating the tension in the region by supplying Israel with large amounts of modern weaponry but the massive Soviet-backed arms buildup in Egypt in Syria eventually convinced them that the strategy of restraint was simply not working. The British and the French had no interest in antagonizing the Arab world (that was, with one exception, openly hostile to Israel to the point of declaring thinly veiled genocidal threats before the two major conflicts within six years). The reasons for this, described in more details in previous Israeli-themed articles, were mostly political. It’s not that Israel didn’t have any tanks, or even very few of them – but there was only so much you could do with a Centurion or an even older Sherman chassis. The “modern” part is especially important. The inability to procure sufficient amounts of high-quality tanks was a major problem for Israel practically since its founding in 1948 right until the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

We covered the Magach 6A to Magach 6B Gal Batash upgrades in our dedicated article and now it’s high time we take a look at the Magach 6 itself. M60A1/M60A3 Magach 6A was upgraded to Magach 6B and ultimately to Magach 6B Gal Batash.M60 Magach 6 was in service alongside the Magach 6A and was later upgraded to Magach 7.The older M60 was referred to as Magach 6 while the newer M60A1 received the designation of Magach 6A (or 6 Alef).īoth tanks resulted in two distinctive branches of development that were actually surprisingly different from one another: Even though both types were fairly different, they both received the Magach 6 designation. The Magach 6 series tanks are, however, specific in the fact that they cover two separate vehicle development branches.īetween 19, Israel obtained a number of M60 and M60A1 Main Battle Tanks from the USA. The previous Magach articles ( Magach 5 and Magach 6B Gal Batash) already mentioned the general Magach story – the Magach tanks are the American M48 and M60 MBT series, upgraded to match Israeli needs. With this article, we finally get to the last and arguably the most iconic of the Magach series – the Magach 7 tanks.

Israel main battle tank magach 6b gal