CAIRO: Any soldier would have felt invincible sitting in those bunkers — a mass of concrete, steel, boulders etc — built half a mile apart all along the east bank of the ninety and odd miles long Suez Canal by Israel. The Bar-Lev Line could not however match a plan skilfully conceived and boldly executed by the Egyptian Army for the historic landing on October 6 last. And once the myth of Bar-Lev Line’s invincibility had been broken, the first to flee in panic were the entrenched Israelis leaving behind dozens of Centurians and Pattons, besides huge dumps of ration and ammunition. …

On a conducted tour of the Qantara sector of Sinai … a party of foreign journalists saw … the battle ground littered with abandoned or knocked out tanks, armoured vehicles, trucks, fighter-bombers and other junk of [the] Israeli war machine. Passing through the deserted and bombed city of Ismailia, inhabited until 1967 by 200,000 people, newsmen drove another 15 miles through the … fertile Nile Valley area to reach an old uninhabited settlement close to the point which the Egyptian Army had selected for one of its landings.

Published in Dawn, November 5th, 2023