Operation Dovecote: Israel’s 1973 Plan to Wipe Out Egypt’s Army in Sinai, and Why It Failed

Most accounts of the 1973 war, known in Israel as the Yom Kippur War and in the Arab world as the October War, begin with the Bar-Lev Line: the chain of forts and sand ramparts Israel built along the east bank of the Suez Canal after it seized Sinai in 1967. Israel’s own planners never asked that line to defeat the Egyptian army. They asked it to hold for 48 hours.

The job of destroying Egypt’s army belonged to a plan with a gentle name: Dovecote, Shovach Yonim in Hebrew. Behind the forts waited the tanks of the Sinai Division, the IDF’s 252nd Armoured Division. Once Egyptian infantry crossed, those tanks would roll forward and catch them in the open sand before Egypt could bring its own armour over the water. Dovecote was the core of Israel’s defence of Sinai. In the first two days of the war, Egypt took it apart.

The Bar-Lev Line was a tripwire meant to hold for 48 hours. Israel’s real answer to an Egyptian crossing was the Dovecote tank counterattack.

Dovecote rested on 48 hours of intelligence warning and on the 1967 lesson that infantry cannot stand against tanks. Both assumptions collapsed on 6 October 1973.

Egyptian infantry hauled Sagger missiles and RPGs over a 20-metre sand rampart and ambushed the counterattacking brigades, destroying roughly 150 Israeli tanks in two days.

Syria had the same Soviet weapons and Israel still took back the Golan. In Sinai the difference was the Egyptian soldier, and Israel has not forgotten him.

Between 1967 and 1970, during what became known as the War of Attrition, Egyptian raiding parties crossed the canal again and again, killing Israeli soldiers, seizing prisoners and slipping back. Israel’s answer was a fortified line named after its chief of staff, Haim Bar-Lev. It cost about $300 million at the time, and some estimates put it at $500 million, which is roughly $2.5 billion in today’s money. Underwater pipes were meant to set the canal on fire. The strongpoints were built in layers of angled concrete and earth so that the men inside could ride out artillery and air strikes and keep their communications running. The closest modern comparison is Iran’s deep underground sites, built to survive American bunker-busters.

One Israeli writer later mocked his own side for the obvious flaw: Israel built the whole thing in front of the Egyptians. Every metre of the rampart rose in full view of the soldiers across the water. They watched it go up, learned what it could and could not do, and came to know it better than any intelligence report could have told them. Egypt then rehearsed the assault for years.

Israel knew the line could be crossed, because Egyptian raiders had crossed it throughout the War of Attrition. So the line’s real purpose was early warning. Israeli planners assumed they would get 48 hours’ notice from intelligence of an Egyptian attack, and that the forts would hold long enough for Dovecote’s tanks, and behind them the reserves, to arrive.

Dovecote placed the Sinai Division’s three armoured brigades, roughly 280 tanks by most accounts, up to 30 kilometres behind the canal. They included American-built M60 and M48 tanks, among the most modern in the world at the time. Their orders were to advance the moment Egyptian infantry came ashore and turn the canal bank into a killing ground.

The thinking came straight out of 1967, when Israeli tanks cut Egyptian infantry to pieces in Sinai. Israeli commanders were sure that no Egyptian armour could get over the canal and the rampart quickly, so the first wave would be foot soldiers with light weapons. Tanks would massacre them, and the garrison could sit safely in its bunkers while it happened.

Spread along a front of some 160 kilometres, though, the tanks were thin on the ground. Each sector would be counterattacked by a handful of them, never a solid wall. Egypt built its plan around that weakness.

Dovecote also depended on Israel’s intelligence services, which Israel trusted almost blindly. The 48 hours never came. The warning Israel finally acted on arrived less than a day before Egyptian troops started crossing on the afternoon of 6 October 1973. The tanks went forward piecemeal, into positions the Egyptians had prepared for them.

What stunned Israeli soldiers first was not the Egyptian bridges or the tanks that followed. It was the infantry. Egyptian soldiers climbed a sand rampart 20 to 25 metres high, at a slope of 45 degrees or more, with heavy weapons on their backs and shoulders. A man climbing that sand empty-handed sinks with every step and struggles to reach the top. These men went up carrying missiles and launchers.

Those weapons were meant for Dovecote’s tanks. Israeli accounts credit Egypt’s chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Saad el-Shazly, with having studied the plan in detail. Egyptian frogmen had already blocked the napalm outlets. While some units dealt with the forts, which held only 441 soldiers in 16 strongpoints on the first day, specialised tank-hunting teams pushed about three kilometres inland and dug in. Behind them came a flood of roughly 100,000 Egyptian troops in the opening phase of the crossing, each unit with its assigned task.

The tank hunters carried three kinds of weapon: shoulder-fired RPG launchers, Sagger guided missiles, and longer-range anti-tank weapons further back. When the Israeli tanks advanced, they drove into ambushes laid in layers, one behind another.

On paper the Sagger, the Soviet 9M14 Malyutka, was unimpressive. Its range was about 3,000 metres, and it was slow, taking roughly half a minute to fly that far. The operator steered it all the way with a small joystick, sending corrections down a thin wire, and had to keep the target in sight throughout, which left him exposed to return fire. Egypt had the missile years before 1973 and had used it in the War of Attrition. Israel had seen it and dismissed it.

That contempt cost Israel dearly. Within the first 48 hours of the war, roughly 150 tanks of the counterattacking force were destroyed, and many of the rest fell back in disorder. Israeli crews described a small yellow light drifting towards them, then a tank exploding. Israeli memoirs add that the Egyptian teams chose their targets, singling out the tanks that carried commanders. The three brigades lost most of their equipment. Even the M60, one of the best tanks of its day, could not survive the ambushes.

Radio traffic from those hours survives. Some of it was used in the 2023 film Golda, starring Helen Mirren as Prime Minister Golda Meir, and it captures Israeli crews calling for help as the counterattack fell apart. By 8 October, after a failed counteroffensive by reserve divisions, the IDF had lost some 180 tanks in a single day, one of the worst tactical defeats in its history.

That memory explains much of Israel’s attitude to Egypt today. In February 2026, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told a closed session of the Knesset’s foreign affairs and defence committee that the Egyptian military is growing stronger and that an excessive buildup must be prevented. In September 2025 Israel asked Washington to press Cairo over runways and underground sites in Sinai. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has gone further, claiming Egypt bears “considerable responsibility” for Hamas’s 7 October attack. These warnings come from fear. Israel’s leaders know what Egypt’s army did the last time it was tested.

Israel has also lived comfortably for decades on its peace with Egypt and the Camp David framework. It has had more than one chance to tear that agreement up and has never done it, because it does not dare.

The heroes of 1973 were someone’s grandfather, uncle or in-law. Almost every Egyptian family has one, and their descendants serve in Egypt’s army today. President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has put the lesson plainly: no one would ever have handed Egypt its land back until they had tasted the price of real war. The thousands of Israelis killed and wounded in 1973 were among the main reasons Israel accepted peace. If the Egyptian army could do it once, it can do it every time.