Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on October 6, 1973, choosing the holiest day of the Jewish year. Egyptian troops crossed the Suez Canal in the early afternoon and Syrian armour moved into the Golan Heights in the same hour. Israel had kept only a thin line of forts on the water, and reserves were not called up until the attack was already under way. The gamble nearly worked.
Six years earlier, in the June 1967 war, Israel had taken the Sinai peninsula, the Golan Heights, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the diplomatic deadlock that followed was the real cause of the 1973 attack. Anwar Sadat, who became Egypt's president in 1970, had concluded that no negotiation would return Sinai while Israel believed it held the stronger hand. He wanted a limited war, one that broke the assumption of Israeli military superiority without trying to destroy the state. Egyptian engineers used high-pressure water hoses to blast gaps in the sand embankment of the Bar Lev Line, and within a day more than a hundred thousand men were on the eastern bank.
On the Golan, roughly 1,400 Syrian tanks faced fewer than 200 Israeli ones, and by the second day Syrian units were within sight of the Sea of Galilee. Israel stabilised that front first. An Israeli counterattack in Sinai on October 8 failed with heavy tank losses, but after the northern front was held, Ariel Sharon's division crossed the canal at Deversoir on October 16 and the Egyptian Third Army was cut off on the far bank. It lasted nineteen days.
The oil weapon did more lasting damage than the military outcome: on October 17 the Arab members of OPEC cut production and embargoed shipments to the United States and the Netherlands, and oil prices in the West had roughly quadrupled by early 1974. Israel lost around 2,600 soldiers, a heavy toll for a country of three million. Egypt and Israel signed a peace treaty in March 1979, and the last Israeli troops left Sinai in 1982. The ceasefire line on the Golan has held since 1974.