Israel Tells Its 1973 Spy-Flight Story. Egypt Should Name the Crews Who Shot It Down

Imagine taking a wound in a fight, then grabbing the knife and cutting your own throat. That is the clearest way to describe what Egypt’s high command did to its own army in June 1967, and it is the right place to begin reading the stories about the Arab-Israeli wars that Israel has been releasing this autumn.

In late September 2026, Israeli outlets carried a newly told account from the October 1973 war: a young intelligence officer, Yehuda Sheffer, sent by Israel’s chief of staff to find out whether Egypt’s armour had crossed the Suez Canal, shot down by Egyptian missiles on October 13, and rescued after parachuting into the Sinai desert. An Israeli news report describes how Sheffer, now a retired lieutenant colonel, told the story more than fifty years later to a gathering of serving intelligence officers.

Israel is doing what confident states do with their wars: it turns them into lessons and legends for the next generation. The question for Egyptians and Arab readers is not whether the Israeli version flatters Israel. Of course it does. The question is why the men on the other end of that story, the Egyptian air defence crews who fired the missiles, still have no names in the public record.

Israel has published the story of a 1973 reconnaissance flight over the Suez Canal whose aircraft was brought down by three Egyptian missiles on October 13, 1973. The pilot was killed; the intelligence officer survived.

Israel presents the episode as a tale of courage. Its real lesson is that Egypt’s air defences were alert enough to catch a high-altitude intelligence flight at a moment when Israel did not know where Egypt’s tanks were.

The Egyptian soldiers who fired those missiles remain anonymous. Egypt should identify and honour them, as Israel records the name of every soldier it loses.

The 1973 story cannot be separated from 1967, when Field Marshal Abdel Hakim Amer’s general withdrawal order turned a battle into a rout. Responsibility for the soldiers who died in that retreat lies with the command that issued it.

The account begins on October 7, 1973, the second day of the war. Egyptian forces had crossed the Suez Canal and overrun the Bar Lev Line, and Israel’s leadership faced a question it could not answer: had Egypt’s armoured divisions crossed into Sinai, or were they still waiting west of the canal? According to the Israeli telling, Sheffer, an experienced field intelligence officer, was summoned to the chief of staff’s office and given a personal mission to find out.

He flew several sorties in the back seat of a two-seat jet, photographing and reporting Egyptian movements. On October 13 the aircraft approached the canal line. Sheffer later recalled seeing black smoke on the ground, then a missile climbing out of it, then a second and a third. After the third explosion he was thrown from the burning aircraft at about 30,000 feet, his oxygen mask torn away, in air far below freezing. By his account his parachute did not open on its own; he pulled it by hand before blacking out, and woke just before landing on a sand dune with a badly injured eye. An Israeli aircraft inventory records the aircraft as a TA-4 Skyhawk and the pilot, Ran Ofri, as killed.

Sheffer knew the canal sector well. He walked east by the sun until he met Israeli armour, which evacuated him to hospital. Israel now tells it as a story of nerve: an officer who flew straight towards the missile belt for a handful of photographs.

The umbrella that blinded Israel was built under fire. During the War of Attrition, Israeli jets struck deep into Egypt, and Egyptian pilots were fighting at a heavy disadvantage. The answer came from the ground. Under Mohamed Ali Fahmy, commander of the Air Defence Forces from 1968 and remembered in Egypt as the father of its air defence, Egypt built a dense network of missile batteries and anti-aircraft guns in fortified positions along the canal zone.

The decisive step came with the ceasefire of August 1970 under the American Rogers initiative. It was a ceasefire, not a peace treaty, and it barred both sides from changing the military situation in a zone along the canal. Egypt moved its batteries forward anyway. By October 1970, about 100 missile sites stood in the zone. Soviet crews initially manned some of the newest systems while Egyptians trained on them. By 1973 the result was a wall that Israeli aircraft approached at great cost; the canal became the most dangerous airspace in the world for Israeli pilots.

This is why Egypt still treats air defence almost as a national obsession, acquiring nearly every system it can. And it is why Israel does the opposite and invests without limit in air superiority. Without its air force, Israel’s army has never fought a major war on its own terms. Today Israel flies about 48 F-35I Adir stealth fighters, a modified version of the aircraft that no other country in the region receives, and in May 2026 its government approved a further squadron on the way to a fleet of around 100. The lesson of 1973 is written into both countries’ arsenals.

None of this can be understood without June 1967, which Arabs call the Naksa, the setback. The first testimony comes from Egypt itself. General Mohamed Fawzi, then chief of staff of the armed forces, described in a recording and in his memoirs how Field Marshal Abdel Hakim Amer summoned him on June 6 and demanded a plan for withdrawing the army from Sinai to the west of the canal, not by the next morning but within minutes. Fawzi and his staff worked out a phased withdrawal, with units covering each other over successive nights, and brought Amer a timetable of four days and three nights. Amer, standing with one foot on a chair, answered: four days and three nights, Fawzi? I have already ordered the withdrawal.

That was a military catastrophe in the literal sense. An army still holding positions across Sinai was ordered to abandon them in a single night, without cover and under Israeli air supremacy. Between roughly 10,000 and 15,000 Egyptian soldiers were listed as killed or missing in the war, and many were lost on the roads of the retreat.

The second testimony comes from the other side. According to the Egyptian writer Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, Israel’s head of military intelligence, General Aharon Yariv, informed Israel’s commanders that a very serious development had occurred: the Egyptian army had been ordered into a general withdrawal. Yariv, as Heikal relates it, could not hide his astonishment. The Egyptian position on the ground was far better than its command believed, many units were still in place and fighting, and the order to withdraw in one night was not justified.

The enemy’s intelligence chief judged the Egyptian army to be in better shape than its own field marshal did. The soldiers who died in that retreat are the responsibility of the command that ordered it. The Egyptian army of 1967 was a formidable, well-armed force, and Gamal Abdel Nasser’s threats did not come from nothing. Israel’s attack wounded that army; Egypt’s own command finished it. The army that crossed the canal six years later had to be rebuilt from ruin, after defeat and three years of attrition.

The army that crossed in 1973 was, for the most part, the sons of farmers from the Delta and Upper Egypt. They did not fight for media attention or for careers after the war. They sat on the canal bank day and night thinking about one thing: settling the account of 1967. In Upper Egypt a blood debt is not forgotten, and that army went to collect one.

The region is again on fire. Israeli forces operate inside southern Syria, keep striking Lebanon and have fought Iran directly. Whatever relative safety Egyptians enjoy today was bought with blood, and most of the people who paid it remain nameless to the public they protected. This is not an accusation against Egypt’s armed forces. It is a demand for memory. Israel engraves the name of every soldier it loses and turns even a failed reconnaissance flight into a lesson for young officers. Egypt should do the same: identify the crews who brought down the aircraft over the canal on October 13, 1973, publish the names of its dead, and tell its own stories before others tell them for it.