Who attacked first in the Yom Kippur War?

6 October 1973 · The Yom Kippur War

Egypt and Syria launched a coordinated surprise attack on Yom Kippur, 6 October 1973, opening the costliest war Israel has fought since 1948. Egyptian armor crossed the Suez Canal into Sinai and Syrian tanks drove into the Golan Heights within the same hour, on the one day of the year when Israel’s army stands down and its reservists are hardest to reach. Israel’s cabinet had intelligence of the coming attack that same morning and chose, deliberately, not to strike first, accepting the first blow rather than fire a preemptive shot as it had in 1967. Nineteen days of fighting followed, among the largest tank battles since World War II, roughly 2,700 Israeli dead, and a ceasefire that left Israeli forces on the west bank of the Suez Canal and within artillery range of Damascus. The war did not change who started it. It changed the peace that came after.

Why it happened: the unfinished business of 1967

After Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War, it held the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, the West Bank and Gaza, and signaled it would trade land for peace. The Arab League answered at Khartoum in September 1967 with the Three No’s: no peace, no recognition, no negotiations with Israel. Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, then opened the War of Attrition along the Suez Canal, a shelling and raiding campaign that ran from 1967 to 1970 and ended in stalemate. His successor, Anwar Sadat, inherited a country still occupied along the canal and a military still humiliated by 1967. Sadat and Syria’s Hafez al-Assad planned a joint surprise offensive to reclaim the Sinai and the Golan by force, calculating that even a limited military success, crossing the canal and holding a strip of it, would break the diplomatic deadlock and force the great powers to intervene on Egypt’s terms. UN Security Council Resolution 242, passed after 1967, called for peace in exchange for withdrawal; six years on, neither had moved.

The attack: 6 October 1973

Egypt and Syria chose Yom Kippur, the fast day when religious and secular Israelis alike are off the roads and out of uniform, and it also fell during Ramadan that year. At roughly 2 p.m., Egyptian forces launched Operation Badr, crossing the canal at multiple points with combat engineers blasting through the Bar-Lev Line’s sand ramparts with high-pressure water cannon, ferrying tens of thousands of troops across within hours. Simultaneously, some 1,400 Syrian tanks struck the Golan, defended by roughly 180 Israeli tanks and a single thin line of fortified outposts. Israel’s political and military leadership had received explicit warning that morning, hours before the attack, from Israeli intelligence and from Jordan’s King Hussein, who flew secretly to Tel Aviv days earlier to warn Prime Minister Golda Meir directly. Meir’s cabinet debated a preemptive strike and rejected it, choosing instead to mobilize reserves and absorb the opening blow, a decision that cost lives in the war’s first days but denied the Arab states any claim that Israel struck first.

The course of the war: Golan and Sinai

On the Golan, Syrian armor pushed to the edge of the plateau overlooking the Sea of Galilee before Israel’s badly outnumbered 7th Armored Brigade held the line in what became known as the Valley of Tears, 7 to 10 October, buying time for reserves to arrive. By 10 to 13 October, Israeli counterattacks pushed Syrian forces back past the 1967 ceasefire line and to within artillery range of Damascus itself, an advance halted only by diplomatic pressure and Iraqi and Jordanian reinforcements rushing to Syria’s aid. In Sinai, Egypt initially held its advance under the cover of Soviet-supplied surface-to-air missile batteries; on 14 October it pushed roughly 1,000 tanks beyond that umbrella in a second offensive, resulting in one of the largest tank engagements since World War II and heavy Egyptian losses. Israel then counterattacked west: on the night of 15 to 16 October, a division under Ariel Sharon crossed the Suez Canal near Deversoir after brutal fighting at the Chinese Farm, establishing a bridgehead on the canal’s west bank. Israeli forces exploited the crossing, cutting supply lines and encircling Egypt’s Third Army, some 20,000 soldiers, and advancing to within about 101 kilometers of Cairo before the ceasefire took hold.

Casualties, and the honest reckoning

Israel lost an estimated 2,656 to 2,688 soldiers killed and thousands more wounded, a toll that, scaled to its population, was proportionally devastating, along with hundreds of tanks and aircraft in the war’s opening days before reserves and resupply turned the fight. Egyptian and Syrian losses were heavier in absolute terms: Egypt’s dead are estimated in the thousands, with figures ranging widely depending on the source, and Syria’s are estimated at roughly 3,500, alongside the loss of well over two thousand tanks between the two Arab armies. The United States resupplied Israel by air from 13 October, Operation Nickel Grass, after the Soviet Union had already begun airlifting replacement weapons to Egypt and Syria; the Arab oil-producing states announced an embargo against the United States and other Israeli allies on 17 October, triggering the 1973 oil crisis.

Ceasefire and aftermath

The UN Security Council passed Resolution 338 on 22 October, calling for an immediate ceasefire and negotiations, followed by Resolutions 339 and 340 as fighting continued around the encircled Third Army before a lasting ceasefire took hold on 25 October. Militarily, Israel ended the war holding more ground than it started with, deeper into Syria and across the canal into Egypt, but the surprise and the casualties shook the country to its core. The Agranat Commission, appointed weeks after the war, found Israel’s military intelligence and army leadership responsible for the failure to anticipate the attack; the public backlash forced Golda Meir’s resignation in April 1974. Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy produced disengagement agreements on both fronts in 1974 and 1975, and the war’s real legacy arrived at Camp David: Sadat’s visit to Jerusalem in 1977, the 1978 Camp David Accords, and the 1979 Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty, which returned every inch of Sinai to Egypt in exchange for peace, the outcome the war’s architects had gambled on achieving by force and won only by negotiating afterward.

How the war is misremembered

Egypt marks 6 October as a national holiday, Armed Forces Day, and named a major city and a Cairo bridge after “the Crossing.” That framing is not false, Egyptian forces did cross the canal and inflict real losses, but the popular telling on all sides tends to stop there: it omits the encirclement of the Third Army, the Israeli bridgehead deep on the canal’s west bank, and the diplomatic collapse that followed for the Arab side militarily. A second distortion, more common in Western retellings, folds 1973 into a generic story of “occupation” provoking resistance, skipping past the Khartoum Three No’s and the six years Israel spent signaling openness to land for peace before a single Egyptian or Syrian tank moved. Both readings miss the same fact: the war opened as a surprise attack on the one day Israel’s guard was down, and it was won on the battlefield by the side that chose not to fire first that morning.

Who attacked first in the Six-Day War · Who started the War of Attrition · The Khartoum Resolution · Who started the wars, overview · Who attacked first, every war · The history they skip

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