A CENTURY to the day after Australian horsemen broke through Ottoman defences in a First World War victory, nearly two hundred re-enactors, including descendants of the soldiers who fought that day, participated in a memorial to those killed in a battle that helped turn the tide of the war and shape the modern Middle East.

Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and New Zealand governor-general Patsy Reddy joined Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, at today’s ceremony marking the centenary of the Battle of Beersheba, paying tribute to the 171 British troops killed.

Some 175 members of the Australian Light Horse Association were participating.

The battle was a crucial, if largely forgotten, victory in the campaign that enabled the Allies to break the Turkish line in what is now southern Israel and capture Jerusalem weeks later.

The victorious campaign redrew the map of the Middle East.

In1917, Allied forces with General Sir Edmund Allenby’s Egyptian Expeditionary Force advanced on Gaza as part of a campaign to knock the Ottoman Empire, Germany’s ally, out of the war.

To outflank the Turkish, troops entrenched around Gaza, a detachment made a manoeuvre through the Negev Desert to capture the strategic biblical town of Beersheba — known both in antiquity and in modern times for its wells.