(IsraelNN.com) The Ministry of Defense has authorized the publication of classified material from the Agranat Commission's report on the institutional failures of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The valuable historical material includes testimony offered by over 50 IDF officers and defense officials, including Ariel Sharon and Moshe Dayan. With the exception of two pages of still-sensitive material, these files represent the last of the classified documents from the Agranat Commission report.

The Yom Kippur War, although eventually capped with victory by Israeli forces, began on October 6, 1973 with serious initial territorial gains by Egyptian and Syrian forces that had launched a coordinated surprise attack. Reversing Arab gains, ultimately coming within mere kilometers of Cairo and Damascus, cost the lives of 2,688 soldiers. As a result of the IDF getting caught off-guard, then-Prime Minister Golda Meir ordered an investigative body, the Agranat Commission, to determine what led to the lack of preparedness. As a result of the commission's findings that an intelligence failure left the nation exposed to attack, Chief of Staff David Elazar and his Chief of Intelligence resigned their posts.

Dayan Nixed a Preemptive Strike
According to material released for the first time on Tuesday, Elazar criticized then-Defense Minister Moshe Dayan for refusing to consider a preemptive strike against Arab forces. "He said we couldn't allow such a thing," Elazar said, noting further that Dayan had also refused to immediately call up the nation's reservists on a large scale. The surprising successes of the Arab attack eventually led to a crisis as reserve units scrambled to their posts.

Elazar also noted that regular IDF divisions deployed on the Syrian and Egyptian fronts were unprepared to hold off a cross-border invasion, although they were meant to be mobilized for just such an eventuality.

For his part, Dayan testified that the intelligence at his disposal ahead of the war misled him regarding the balance of forces and the enemy's intentions. "We felt that our capabilities, along with the air force, would be enough to hold them off," he explained, saying that the defense establishment was "fairly certain" that the army could "hold off a first strike."


Dayan testified that the intelligence at his disposal ahead of the war misled him.


Regarding the intelligence reports regarding Arab mobilization for war, Dayan told the Agranat Commission, "We could not be sure that full-scale war would break out based on what we saw."

The IDF Was Too 'Used to Winning'
Ariel Sharon, in command of a reserve armored division in the Southern Command at the time of the war, told the Agranat Commission, "Our forces suffered a deep, unprecedented shock, because the IDF had always been a victorious army. In this generation, there were no people like us, who had tasted failure. It was an army that was used to winning. It had never had to weather any defeats."

Aside from that general analysis, Sharon also singled out the failure of senior commanders to go out into the field in the early stages of the war. "I recommended that, according to my opinion, [Southern District Commander Shmuel Gonen] order all the officers to go out into the field in order to know what was really taking place. The picture in the War Room was a very difficult one. Very difficult in terms of the numbers of losses we already clearly knew we had," Sharon said.

He went on to qualify his criticism by saying that senior IDF officers Gonen and Elazar were brave men who had remained uninformed of the true situation.