The Yom Kippur War: How Israel missed the warning signs before the surprise attack – opinion

Israel's failure to anticipate the 1973 Yom Kippur War was largely due to Major-General Eli Zeira, head of the Military Intelligence Directorate (MID), who dismissed numerous warnings. Despite unprecedented Arab military deployments observed by Israeli troops and multiple foreign intelligence reports, Zeira maintained a "low-danger-of-war assessment." He had previously been correct in predicting no war six months earlier, which discouraged superiors from challenging his judgment. Crucially, a sophisticated tapping device, "Special Means," designed to monitor Egyptian war preparations, was not activated by Zeira due to his conviction that Egyptian President Anwar Sadat would not risk war and his fear of exposing the device. This led to a critical intelligence blind spot, as evidenced by an Egyptian soldier's diary found after the war, which explicitly stated, "We'll be going to war in the next few days." Even as tensions escalated, Zeira refused requests to mobilize intelligence reservists or activate the device, stating, "The situations you see are not the ones that I see."