Monday 06/Oct/2025 – 02:50 PM
Last year, the Ministry of Defense revealed a group of rare secret military documents dating back to the Sixth of October war in 1973, when the Egyptian and Syrian armed forces launched a surprise attack to liberate the occupied territories from the grip of Israel, in one of the fiercest wars in the region and lasted for nearly 3 weeks.
Documents titled The October War Documents 1973 .. The secrets of the war included reports of combat operations, the development of forces, intelligence information records, accurate information about the strategic planning of the war, as well as a comprehensive assessment of the internal conditions in both Egypt and Israel, and the scenes of decision -making within the Israeli leadership before, during and after the outbreak of the fighting.
First: Before the battle
Since the defeat of June 1967, Israel has worked to establish widespread propaganda about its military superiority and its ability to deter any Arab attack, the photographer of the Arab armies as unable to organize or serious planning. And Israel built this idea its strong fortifications along the Suez Canal, which was later known as the “Bar Lev Line”, and considered it an “irrefutable wall” that cannot be crossed.
However, some Israeli leaders warned of excessive vanity, including former Prime Minister Levy Ashkol, who said in a speech on January 12, 1969:
We have to not be deceived, because the Egyptian does not sleep on a defeat, even if its time is long.
In February 1971, after the initiative of the late President Anwar Sadat for peace, then Israeli Foreign Minister Aba Eban commented:
“It is a trick, but our defense minister, Moshe Dayan, said: Israel is not able to withdraw from the best line it seized.”
As for General David Eliezer, the former Israeli chief of staff, he said about the Barlev line that no one can penetrate it, but the Egyptian soldier proved the opposite after the outbreak of the war.
Second: During the battle:
With the beginning of the sudden Egyptian attack on the sixth of October, the Israeli army was explicitly shocked, and its leadership testimonies began to reflect the scale of surprise and collapse.
“The Egyptian soldier ascends the wave after the wave on our defenders and our sites at all on him, and it is indifferent to death. We are trying to repel his attacks with all our strength, but we are facing an army that we do not know how to fight it under these circumstances.”
On the fourth day of the battle, October 9, 1973, Moshe Dayan, Minister of Defense Minister, said: “In the first two days of the battle, we lost more than 200 tanks. We now have forces less than the necessary limit to bridge the gap between the second and third armies, the general military position is very bad, and we face a war we have never faced before, and we have to make our accounts again.”
These documents, which were released half a century after the war, show the size of the confusion that prevailed in the Israeli leadership in the early days of the battle, and how the Egyptian army succeeded in the heart of the balance of military and political force in the region, stressing that the October war was not just a military battle, but rather a watershed moment that restored the Arabs and changed the face of the Middle East forever.
