By Pierre Kosmidis

All photos by @DimaWaPhoto, submitted to www.ww2wrecks.com and used by permission.

Who would expect to find an iconic WW2 German tank, such as this Panzer IV, among other WW2 vehicles of all sorts and backgrounds, 3,000 kilometres from Germany? www.ww2wrecks.com has contacted Dima @DimaWaPhoto who has walked on the battlefields of the Arab-Israeli wars and documented with his camera the tanks that were either destroyed or abandoned in the area.

Dima’s photos in our feature “Battlefield Archaeology: The armoured beasts of WW2 in the largest open-air museum in the world”, attracted worldwide attention, as they documented a bygone era, an era of WW2 tanks, self-propelled guns and all sorts of equipment, that lived to fight another day, until meeting their end on the battlefields of the Arab-Israeli Wars.

Here are detailed photos of this German Panzer IV

Military registration number 67,582

Production number. (FGST) 92758

Cannon number C3416

Version Ausf J

Manufacturer Nibelungenwerk, along with Dima Va’s description:

“5-6 years ago, I found an old photo with an abandoned and wrecked old German tank.

The photo impressed me, so I started to search any information about the WW2-era equipment- German, US, British and Soviet, that was used by the IDF (Israel Defence Force) and the Arab forces during the Israeli-Arab Wars, from 1948 to 1967.

But the main idea was to find any traces of the PzIV.

It took me about 6 months and 5 attempts to find the tank.

It was hidden in the trench in the abandoned Syrian village in the restricted area and could only be seen from a very short distance or using a drone.

Part of the village still remains heavily mined.

In the 1960s the tank was firing at Israeli settlements on the east shore of Kineret lake until it was damaged by the IDF reconnaissance force and abandoned by retreating Syrian forces during the 6 Day War in 1967.”