Who attacked first in the 1956 Suez war?

29 October 1956 · The Suez War (Israel’s Operation Kadesh)

Israel struck first, invading Sinai on 29 October 1956 in coordination with Britain and France, and an honest page says so. What preceded the shot: Egypt had closed the Suez Canal and the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, in defiance of UN Security Council Resolution 95 of 1951, and for five years had armed and dispatched fedayeen raiders from Egyptian-occupied Gaza and Sinai who killed and wounded hundreds of Israeli civilians. A blockade is an act of war in international law, and it was years old before Israel moved. First shot: Israel. First act of war: Egypt.

Why the war started

The roots run back to the 1948 war, which Egypt lost while walking away holding the Gaza Strip, never annexed, never turned into a state, simply garrisoned. From 1951 onward, Egyptian intelligence began recruiting, training, and arming Palestinian fedayeen, “self-sacrificers,” to cross into Israel and attack farms, buses, and border towns. By 1956 those raids had killed roughly 100 Israelis and wounded several hundred more. Egypt also refused to let Israeli or Israel-bound cargo through the Suez Canal, a violation of the 1888 Constantinople Convention guaranteeing free passage, and closed the Straits of Tiran at the mouth of the Gulf of Aqaba, Israel’s only sea route to Africa and Asia through its southern port of Eilat. The UN Security Council told Egypt to stop in Resolution 95 of September 1951. Egypt kept the blockade in place anyway.

Two other currents converged on the same autumn. In September 1955 Egypt’s president Gamal Abdel Nasser signed a large arms deal with Czechoslovakia, in effect the Soviet bloc, bringing hundreds of tanks and modern jet aircraft into Egyptian hands and threatening to erase Israel’s qualitative military edge before it could be used. Then, on 26 July 1956, after the United States and Britain withdrew financing for Egypt’s Aswan High Dam, Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal Company, jointly owned by British and French shareholders and operator of a waterway that carried most of Western Europe’s oil. Britain and France now had their own reasons to want Nasser gone.

Who planned it, and how

In secret talks at Sèvres, outside Paris, from 22 to 24 October 1956, Israel, Britain, and France agreed on a coordinated plan, later called the Sèvres Protocol: Israel would invade Sinai first, giving Britain and France the pretext to issue an ultimatum to both sides to withdraw from the canal zone “to protect it,” then land their own forces and retake it once Egypt, as expected, refused. It was a collusion the three governments denied for decades and that Israel’s own government has since acknowledged in full.

The course of the fighting

Israel launched Operation Kadesh on 29 October 1956, dropping paratroopers under Ariel Sharon at the Mitla Pass deep in Sinai while armored columns swept across the peninsula from the north and center. Within a week the IDF had overrun nearly all of Sinai, including Sharm el-Sheikh at its southern tip, and encircled Gaza. Britain and France issued their ultimatum on 30 October and, when Egypt refused, began bombing Egyptian airfields on 31 October before landing paratroopers and marines near Port Said on 5 to 6 November, fighting their way partway down the canal before a UN-brokered ceasefire took hold on 7 November.

Forces and casualties, honestly stated

Roughly 100,000 Israeli soldiers were mobilized within 72 hours, an extraordinary logistical feat for a nation of under two million. Israel lost around 172 to 230 soldiers killed and several hundred wounded, sources vary within that range. Egyptian losses were far heavier: estimates run from roughly 1,000 to 3,000 soldiers killed, thousands wounded, and thousands more taken prisoner, along with an estimated 1,000 Egyptian civilians killed in British and French bombing around Port Said. Britain lost 22 dead and France 10. The canal itself was blocked by sunken ships and closed to traffic from October 1956 until March 1957.

Outcome and aftermath

Militarily Egypt was routed. Politically Nasser won. The United States, under President Eisenhower, and the Soviet Union both condemned the invasion and forced a withdrawal, Washington threatening financial pressure on Britain and Moscow threatening missile strikes. British prime minister Anthony Eden resigned within months, the last gasp of Britain’s old imperial reach in the Middle East, and Eisenhower moved to fill the vacuum with the Eisenhower Doctrine of 1957, pledging US support to states resisting Soviet-backed aggression. Israel withdrew from all of Sinai and Gaza by March 1957, but only after securing two concrete gains: a UN Emergency Force (UNEF) stationed on the Egyptian side of the border to stop the fedayeen raids, and freedom of navigation through the Straits of Tiran, both of which held for a decade. When Nasser expelled UNEF and reimposed the blockade in May 1967, it triggered the Six-Day War. Egypt, defeated on the battlefield in 1956, also resumed shelling Israeli positions along the canal within two years of the 1967 defeat, a campaign that hardened into the declared War of Attrition.

How the war gets misrepresented today

The most common distortion strips the year down to one image, Israeli tanks rolling into Sinai, and calls it unprovoked aggression against Egypt, alongside two fading colonial powers grabbing back a canal. That framing is not wrong about the collusion, which was real and which this page states plainly, but it is incomplete in the way that matters most: it erases five years of blockade and fedayeen killing that preceded the tanks, and it erases that Egypt’s own closure of an international waterway was, under the law of the time, an act of war on its own terms. A second distortion runs the other way and pretends Israel’s role was purely defensive; it was not, and the honest record says Israel struck first alongside two empires settling their own colonial account. Both distortions serve a purpose: the first excuses Egypt’s illegal blockade by omission, the second erases the years of fedayeen terror that made Israeli patience run out. Neither is the full record.

Who attacked first in the Six-Day War · Who started the War of Attrition · Fedayeen · Who attacked first in the 1948 war · Who attacked first, every war · The History They Skip

Sources

From Who attacked first on the main site.