Who started the War of Attrition?

1967 to 1970 · The War of Attrition

The War of Attrition was a nearly three-year, undeclared war fought mainly along the Suez Canal between Israel and Egypt, opened by Egypt’s own choice to reject peace and reopen the front by force. Within weeks of Egypt’s defeat in the Six-Day War, its artillery began shelling the new Israeli line on the canal’s east bank; by 1969 President Gamal Abdel Nasser had given the strategy a name and a public justification, aiming to make the occupation of Sinai too costly for Israel to hold while never risking the open battlefield defeat of 1967 again. It ran from roughly July 1967 to August 1970, drew in the Soviet Union as a direct combatant on Egypt’s side, and ended in a ceasefire that changed no borders and killed more than a thousand Israeli soldiers and several thousand Egyptians for no territorial gain on either side.

Who fought it

The core combatants were Israel and Egypt, with Syria running a smaller, parallel front against Israeli positions on the Golan Heights. Egypt did not fight alone: the Soviet Union, alarmed at Israeli air superiority over the canal, sent thousands of its own personnel, including fighter pilots who flew Egyptian-marked MiG-21s and manned advanced SA-3 surface-to-air missile batteries, a level of direct Soviet military involvement in the conflict rarely matched before or since. Jordan stayed largely out of the shooting after its costly defeat in 1967, though Palestinian fedayeen groups, increasingly based in Jordan and later Lebanon, launched a separate campaign of cross-border raids and hijackings during the same years that Israel treated as connected but distinct from the canal war.

Why it started

The cause traces directly to Arab diplomacy after 1967, not to any Israeli provocation. Israel held the Sinai, Gaza, the West Bank, the Golan and a reunited Jerusalem, and within weeks signaled it would trade land for peace. The Arab League’s answer came at the Khartoum Resolution of September 1967: no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel, the “Three No’s.” With the diplomatic door shut by the Arab side itself, Nasser chose a military strategy instead: he could not retake Sinai in open war, so he would erode Israel’s will and army through sustained bombardment, raids and a war of nerves, a strategy he formally proclaimed in 1969. The goal was explicit: reverse a battlefield defeat through attrition rather than negotiation, precisely the choice Khartoum had foreclosed and Israel’s own offer had tried to avoid.

How the war was fought

The fighting moved through escalating phases across the canal’s roughly 100-mile front. Egyptian artillery opened with sporadic shelling of the new Bar-Lev Line, Israel’s chain of fortified outposts on the canal’s east bank, through 1967 and 1968, killing Israeli soldiers in a static, dug-in war reminiscent of World War I trench warfare. Israel answered with commando raids deep into Egyptian territory, most notably a July 1969 assault that captured a Soviet-supplied radar station and a December 1969 raid, Operation Rooster, that airlifted an entire Egyptian radar installation back to Israel intact. From January 1970, Israel escalated to deep-penetration bombing raids by its air force striking targets near Cairo itself, a campaign that pushed Nasser to fly to Moscow and secure direct Soviet air-defense involvement, transforming the skies over the canal into one of the most dangerous air-combat environments of the Cold War. The heaviest single air battle came in July 1970, when Israeli jets shot down several Soviet-piloted MiGs in one engagement, a rare direct clash between Israeli and Soviet forces.

Where and when it ended

Diplomatic pressure from Washington, formalized in the second Rogers Plan named for US Secretary of State William Rogers, produced a ceasefire that both sides accepted, taking effect on 7 August 1970. Egypt violated the ceasefire’s terms almost immediately by moving surface-to-air missile batteries forward into the newly created buffer zone, a breach Israel protested but did not restart the war over, and one that would matter three years later when those same missiles blunted Israel’s air force at the opening of the Yom Kippur War. Nasser died of a heart attack weeks later, in September 1970, succeeded by Anwar Sadat, who inherited both the stalemate and the missile batteries his predecessor had smuggled forward.

Casualties and outcome, honestly stated

Israel lost somewhere over a thousand soldiers killed and several thousand wounded in a war most Israelis at the time barely registered as a full war, since it never produced a single decisive battle; Egyptian and Soviet losses ran considerably higher, credible estimates placing Egyptian military dead in the thousands, alongside hundreds of civilian casualties from Israeli air raids near populated areas along the canal. No territory changed hands and no ceasefire line moved. What the war did change was psychological and strategic: it convinced Sadat that only a fresh war, not further attrition, could break the deadlock and force Israel and the world back to the negotiating table, a lesson he applied directly in October 1973.

How it is misremembered today

Popular retellings of the Arab-Israeli conflict routinely skip from the Six-Day War straight to 1973, erasing the three-year war in between and, with it, the clearest evidence that Egypt chose renewed war over the peace Israel had signaled it wanted. Some revisionist accounts also misdate or blur the Rogers Plan ceasefire violation, treating Egypt’s forward missile deployment as a minor technicality rather than the direct enabler of Egypt’s initial 1973 success against Israeli airpower. The honest record does not flatter either side completely: Israel’s deep-penetration bombing near Cairo was controversial even within Israel and drew Soviet intervention that raised real risk of superpower confrontation. But the war’s origin is not ambiguous. It began with Egyptian artillery on a line Egypt itself had lost through invasion in 1967, formalized by a president who said openly that he meant to bleed Israel rather than talk to it.

Who attacked first in the Six-Day War · Who attacked first in the Yom Kippur War · The Khartoum Resolution · Who started the wars · The History They Skip · Who Attacked First

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