Israel's battle with Hamas recalls Yom Kippur War and its fateful effects

When the Palestinian militants of Hamas unleashed their attack inside Israel on Oct. 7, triggering the latest war in the Middle East, it was impossible to miss the significance of the timing.

The deadly assaults that killed more than a thousand Israeli troops and civilians in the first four days came just 50 years and a day after the start of the Yom Kippur War in 1973. That brief but intense war, like this month's Hamas attacks, seemed to catch the vaunted Israeli intelligence and front-line defenses with their guard down.

For a few days, the 1973 attackers from Egypt and Syria carried all before them, seizing territory they had lost in the Six-Day War of 1967 in the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights. It seemed possible for several parlous days that the Jewish state, then just 25 years old, might not survive.

But Israel was able to turn the tide, bolstered by enormous shipments of U.S. tanks, jet fighters and