Mr. Alex Zeitlin, the director of the YouTube channel "The Professors Are Coming", talks with Lt. Col. (retired) Eli Dekel about the possibility that Egypt is planning a surprise attack on Israel. In the conversation, the factors that may lead Egypt to attack Israel are presented and the methods of action to carry out the attack are analyzed.
You can find more details about what is happening in Egypt and the strengthening of the Egyptian army on this website
Edited transcript
Zeitlin: Well, friends, I am very happy to see today our expert Eli Dekel from AMAN, formerly in the Egyptian arena, a ground intelligence and infrastructure man. Always, in all my conversations on [YouTube] channels in Russian, I now mention that this is the man who predicted the Russian attack on Ukraine According to satellite images and ground intelligence analysis
Well, we gathered today to talk about the Egyptian threat and what a war against Egypt could look like. So maybe before we dive into possible scenarios of the war, into the scenarios of such a war, maybe you could briefly explain in a few sentences what the threat is and what the overall size of the Egyptian army is.
We did it in videos, so those who want to delve deeper can also watch videos we have already made.
Dekel: Okay, the Egyptian army today has 16 divisions. To simplify, a division - it's a division for. The truth is that an Egyptian division is much larger than an Israeli division. The main difference is that an Israeli division has a single anti-aircraft battalion and an Egyptian division has several battalions. But that's not all, the Egyptian division also has much more artillery.
No matter, to keep it simple, the Egyptian army has 16 divisions. Of these: three light infantry divisions used to secure the regime (although we will not see them in the war with us, but they free the rest of the army to war against us). The three light divisions will remain around Cairo to secure the regime.
The remaining 13 divisions: four are armored and nine are mechanized. This is roughly the ground forces. but! There is a very big but here. The Egyptian army has two exceptions: A. In the field of ground forces, it has a great many independent forces, all kinds of independent brigades, paratrooper brigades, special forces brigades. I don't want to bore the listeners, unless you want then I have the whole list.
If desired, two more divisions can easily be made from all the independent forces. So the land army should be seen in the order of forces, which actually numbers 15 divisions [in the assault level].
In addition to the ground forces, the Egyptian army has a very large air force, and it has a navy that is the sixth largest in the world. [This is an incorrect statement. The Egyptian Navy is ranked eighth].
A few words about the Navy. The Egyptian navy has been greatly strengthened in recent years, like most of the Egyptian army. But his intensification is breaking records, you could say. Today, the Egyptian Navy has approximately 50 ports at its disposal. The idea is that every civilian port is also good for the navy. Reverse, it doesn't work! That is, a naval port is not good for trade, because it has no cranes and so on. From 2010, the Egyptian army roughly doubled its naval bases. Until then he had ten naval bases and today he has 18. This is almost "double", which is characteristic, in addition to the large number of naval bases he built, he built a large naval base in western Egypt, close to the border with Libya. At the same time, he is building a port, probably civilian, that can be used by the army in Al-Arish, which is close to us.
Now regarding the order of forces [SDF] of the ground forces in the Egyptian army. The regular army has at least 3,100 tanks and there are at least another 1,300 tanks in warehouses. That means the SDF of the Egyptian army includes a minimum of 4,400 tanks. I am not counting the [tanks] in the independent units, some of which are scattered in Egypt and did not participate in the war. Of course they have cannons for the most part, which is typical of the Egyptian army since time immemorial. Also, the Egyptian army has a large air force with dozens of air bases - something that makes it very difficult to hit the Egyptian air force [or repeat the Six Day War patent when we hit the airports].
Now, I'm in the conversation we had two weeks ago, I made a mistake and it's time to fix it. I also corrected it immediately in the listeners' comments file. Well, I said that in the last year the Egyptian army has been operating in two operations that worry me. The one he added to the regular army was another 700 tanks, and I don't back down from that, it wasn't a mistake. As far as I know a 30% increase in the army in the regular armored forces and this is of course puzzling, why are they doing this in the last year or two?
The second thing I said - that was a mistake! I said that the Chinese changed the tanks from Patton to Abrahams, this is not true. I checked myself again, and it turned out to be a mistake. So this is an opportunity once again to return to the public and say that what I said two months ago about the replacement of tanks in Sinai is not true.
Now all this great soldier, what can he do? Until two years ago, I thought that the most likely thing he would do was what is called "Rotem". "Rotem" is our operation or code name. In this operation, the Egyptian army in 1960 was unexpectedly organized in Sinai contrary to the agreements after the Kadesh War [1965]. In fact, the six days were also a kind of "rotem" suddenly [the Egyptian army filled Sinai with an army]. Except that we are in 1967, we initiated and attacked him. According to this idea, Egypt is planning to do it again, and by the time we come to our senses, we will find six Egyptian divisions drawn up on the border line between Rafah and Eilat. With this power, Egypt will impose arrangements on us that we may not want.
The "bonbon", or the great achievement of the Yom Kippur War, was that we supposedly achieved the denuclearization of Sinai. [Now] No more Chinese demobilization! Not a shred remains of the agreements of the peace agreement on the issue of Chinese demobilization.
[Egyptian army), especially in recent years it has increased the number of bridges and crossings on the Suez Canal from six bridges to 60. Of these bridges, there is now a real innovation of the last days, the Egyptians] are soon going to inaugurate the Firdan Bridge. Firden Bridge is a railway bridge. [The amount of tanks that a train can transport [a double track train], no bridge and no tunnel can simulate and compensate for that. In the past wars, in "Kedesh" 1956 and the Six Days, most of the tank transport to Sinai was by train. Now they are about to finish the construction of a bridge, the railway bridge, and they are making trial trips to see if there are any faults or something like that. [The system of bridges and tunnels in the Suez Canal] allows the Egyptian army to bring six more divisions into Sinai within a day, when Sinai currently has more or less three divisions. So in Sinai there will be nine divisions in total.
I, until two years ago, thought that what the Egyptian army was planning to do was to take six divisions [from the west bank of the canal] and quickly bring them into Sinai and prepare along the Israel-Egypt border.
Among the divisions, I would like to mention the Marine Division. The Egyptian army has a camp of a regular mechanized division in Alexandria, which also adapts as a division for landing from the sea. The Egyptian Navy has 36 landing forces, which is more or less, you could take this whole division and land it anywhere you want. Apparently they can land anywhere on the globe. What's interesting about this camp of the division is that after four years or so, the camp It underwent a facelift and added all kinds of welfare facilities to the camp. Among the things that were added to the camp was a huge sand table that was built to allow the officer to practice the tasks of the division in a visual way. What is surprising is that the sand table is not of the fighting sector in Libya Esikandron Bay in Turkey, the sand table belongs to Sinai and southern Israel. The sand table indicates that the main mission of the division is to land in the Gaza Strip or in the south of Israel. The establishment of a sand table in the Alexandrian division is contrary to the estimates of intelligence personnel who believed that the division's role was to land. He took part in a possible campaign against Libya. An analysis of published publications shows that the Egyptian army devotes a lot of training to landing forces from the sea with a lot of help from helicopters and planes.
[Analysis of the possible methods of operation of the landed division: DPA A. The landing of the division in the Gaza Strip. In this way, the Egyptian army gains the advantage of an advance of about 50 kilometers towards the center of Israel, when from an international point of view this step can be interpreted as a step to protect the residents of the Gaza Strip. DPA B is the landing of the division in southern Israel - such a move that could endanger Israel's strategic centers].
Two years have passed since the Russia-Ukraine war broke out. I learned from this war that the United States is a support of a broken barrel. Until it somehow helped Ukraine, then Ukraine's regular army was effectively destroyed. Even today, two years after the outbreak of the war, the United States was unable to return to Ukraine the territories occupied by Russia. I also remember how the United States behaved when Saddam Hussein occupied Kuwait. It took the Americans six months to retake Kuwait. I am afraid that this will increase the Egyptian appetite for offensive actions against Israel, not just to come and prepare along the border and say I am here.
By the way, I didn't say this before, among the special things that the army has is that it has 1600 [heavy] engineering tools such as shovels, and bulldozers. This enormous engineering force allows the Egyptian army to fortify easily and quickly. Dig in, build bunkers, and sit down so that our Air Force is less likely to hit him.
As I said, so already two years ago [I started] talking about offensive DPFs. Today there are reasons to increase the fear, I will also detail why I think so. It is not only the American broken barrel support that was discovered in the Russia-Ukraine war. But there are other reasons
Today I see two possible offensive courses of action:
One, action in the south, the southern Negev north of Eilat. To cut off the south of the Negev from the north without occupying Eilat. Conquering a city is a complicated thing, and can cause a lot of losses, and anyway if Eilat is cut off from the center of the country, the city actually has no right to exist. Relatively, it is very easy to do it militarily. I'm talking about an operation north of Eilat up to Ovda airport. The operation includes the occupation of the armory school, and other facilities in the area.
This course of action gives Egypt a huge advantage, in that it allows them to thwart the plot of "peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia" hatched by the United States. [From Sisi's point of view] this is a conspiracy. what's the plot They will give the Palestinians Gaza, Judea and Samaria, two states for two peoples, this is roughly the idea, and in return Saudi Arabia will sign some kind of agreement with Israel. What threatens Egypt in this agreement is the idea of opening a trade line between India and Ashdod, this is the "bonbon". This is an option that I don't think will arise and will not exist for Egypt. As far as Egypt is concerned, an agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia is not only the loss of revenue from the Suez Canal, [because it creates enormous competition]. It is also the Egyptian honor. Egypt has dreamed since its establishment to be the center of the Arab world, and if this thing comes true and there really is a train from India to Ashdod, and Saudi Arabia is the queen of the whole story, Egypt will be a neglected country in North Africa. This could be their trigger to act militarily against us. I think Egypt is now facing a dilemma. They cannot act against Saudi Arabia because Saudi Arabia is fattening them with money, they cannot tell Saudi Arabia not to make peace with Israel. Egypt has no influence over Saudi Arabia, who is she to tell Saudi Arabia what to do. The second host is the United States. So Egypt, for all its greatness, cannot bend America.
This whole idea that everyone is happy about, about this peace with Saudi Arabia. In my opinion, as far as Egypt is concerned, this is an act, which I don't know whether to define it as being killed and not passing, but in [my opinion] Egypt will make great efforts to thwart it. It is not good for Egypt that she will lose part of the revenue from the Suez Canal.
An Egyptian move to occupy the southern Negev serves [Egyptian ambition to disrupt the agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and opens new trade channels between Africa and Asia for Egypt].
DPA A is, in my opinion, the most reasonable, because it can be carried out with few forces. The width of the sector between us and Jordan in this area reaches about 15 kilometers.
DPA B is larger. The intention is to break into the center of the Negev in the Tzalim area and move towards Dimona. [Meaning] cutting off the State of Israel south of Beer Sheva. The military assets are of course much larger. The fear that the world will not swallow this move [meaning an existential threat to the State of Israel ].
[Regarding Egypt's offensive methods of operation] I would like to go back to what I said [on this channel] about two months ago. Two things: A. The unexplained increase, really incomprehensible, why are they now increasing the armored personnel carrier by 30%, what happened? And the second thing is that in the last year they are building large tunnels in Sinai, which I think will be used for surface-to-air missiles, that is, to protect About the Egyptian forces in Sinai not only with the anti-aircraft that the forces have (and there are many, as I said, in each Egyptian division there are five anti-aircraft battalions). They also got s-400 or something like that. To protect these missiles, or the missile depots, I find 30 huge tunnels [in Sinai], I mean tunnels with an entrance diameter of 7-8 meters and an approximate depth of 40 meters.
These explanations I [listed] are military, and I have discussed them before. In addition, there is a series of things happening inside Egypt, which may push Sisi to some ill-advised move. Today, the Egyptian people are in the process of waking up from the dream of "Sisi the Savior". When Sisi took power he was very energetic and did all kinds of projects. The Egyptians began to dream that here we are done with the sleepy President Mubarak, who does not do much for Egypt, and is constantly treating all kinds of diseases in Europe [and the rest of the time] is in Sharm, and who sees him [in Cairo] anyway?
Suddenly, a president comes who literally works almost 24/7 investing and building and doing. Now there is great scrutiny of all his projects, almost all of them are either faltering or a total failure. The first [failed venture] is the new Suez Canal. If it weren't for the war in Russia, it would have been a loss from the fund, the war between Russia and Ukraine and the disconnection of Europe from Russian fuel resources, there is a bit of a boom in revenues from the Suez Canal, even a bit of profit. But all in all, this business called the new Suez Canal, which was supposed to be finished within a year, is still being worked on to this day. Of course, a delay [in completing the work] costs money.
When Sisi came to power he started a huge project of eight huge farms to grow vegetables for export. This business is collapsing and going, one farm has been completely dismantled, and in others all the nylons [of the greenhouses] or most of the nylons are having fun in the wind.
He also embarked on a huge project of raising fish and worms (Muslims keep kosher in terms of not eating pork, but they eat worms, all kinds of shrimps and such. The idea was to build two huge farms for raising fish and worms. Apparently this business is not successful.
He had another genius idea, to collect all the carpenters. [The idea] that every carpenter who has some carpentry in Alexandria [will come to the city of carpenters] to bring everything to one place. There will be the plank warehouses, there will be engineers, and there will be an [upgrade] of the industry. What to do, and it doesn't work to bring all the carpenters to Damite, and this city according to Egyptian sources is not rising.
Sisi dreamed of a new capital city. Many parts of the city have been built but there are still no cats! He has been building it for eight years and there is no resident. Empty, except for the workers. In the Egyptian media as well as the world they are talking about this project that is probably a waste of billions of dollars - it is not taking off.
He built a new city of Ismailia in Sinai. It doesn't take off either
In short, the business is not working, the people feel that this leader is a bit too dreamy, not to say a fantasist, not to say that he goes big. All this can lead him to unfounded decisions. Right now what he is doing is he increased the Shin Bet by 100% - "double"! Double in two years, he increased the Shin Bet to secure his head and increased the prisons by 300%. It is true that you can live on bayonets for many years. But it is difficult, and it can lead him to make ill-considered decisions
Zeitlin: That's it, that's what I see in terms of his possibilities. Yes, now on our side we have no forces that can probably stop such an entry of the Egyptian army [into the Sinai]. We have one minus division that sits on a permanent basis in the entire area from Eilat to Rafah, yes it can largely secure the border [in the Batash], but it cannot repel an Egyptian army
Dekel: I suggest you don't mess with the IDF. I don't follow the IDF, but I know from my experience of serving in the IDF, when in the IDF they say a division, in practice it's not always a division. It can be: half, third and quarter. [Because] it is gone and it does not exist and it needs to be completed. When I say an Egyptian division, I see their formations, if [the standard in the battalion is 41 tanks, then in practice there are 41 tanks in the battalion].
The idea is to do it [the transition of forces to Sinai] within a day, within a day! They take the three divisions that are in Sinai anyway and bring six more divisions from the other side [of the Suez Canal]. They are helped by the railway bridge and their 60 bridges, and by the time you come to your senses, Eilat is cut off. Or as I said the DPA of "Rotem.
Zeitlin: It was clear, clear. Now the readiness test of the Egyptian army, not only the numbers and the number of soldiers in the units and the like, do you think they have a high level of combat readiness? What is their combat prowess?
Dekel: No, there are problems here. Although it is a regular army that does not have a problem of [reserve replenishment], the army today is busy with all kinds of civilian projects, for example: all these farms for growing vegetables. Almost every division got a farm. This one grows cucumbers and this one grows tomatoes, all kinds of things like that. In other words, the army is not busy 100% of its time with training and is also busy helping with all kinds of projects the president has, whatever he wants that week. It can change, they started with the farms for growing cucumbers and vegetables, and now they destroyed it, and they are working on the development of agriculture. The president now has a new craze. His idea that Egypt would be the granary of Europe. The grain barn no less! Today Egypt buys most of its wheat from outside, the president is going to double the delta. All the cries of Egypt in the media that there is no water, and the dam in Ethiopia took the water, despite this it is going to double the delta. Doubling is of course a bit excessive, we are talking about the flowering of desert lands to the extent of 20 million dunams, that is three times the total cultivated areas of the Land of Israel. The army, I guess helps with that, meaning all kinds of projects. That's why I guess the army has a double life, on the one hand it trains and we see its training and so on. On the other hand, he is mobilized a lot for the implementation of the president's development projects. I can't tell you how hurtful it is, but surely the soldiers' time is not 100% devoted to the army
Zeitlin: And another question about the Air Force. Air force is very big, it is huge in terms of numbers. Yes, we are talking thousands there, yes, in terms like that, but what about his ability to deal with the Israeli Air Force? You know size isn't everything, the number of planes isn't everything either,
Dekel: Look, he tries to diversify his purchases a lot. He will not be in a situation where there is some ruler in the United States who will turn off the faucet, and then he stands with his tongue out. Therefore, the Egyptian Air Force is built from American planes like ours. Although he does not have the f 35, he does have a Russian equivalent f 35. Now, I don't know how parallel it really is, but [the Egyptian Air Force] has the most modern Russian aircraft available, and yes it has purchased 24 Rafale aircraft [from France] and now it is going to double that to 48.
Even if the quality of the [Egyptian Air Force] is a bit poor compared to our Air Force, mainly in terms of armament, probably
By the way, I don't know what he is hiding. On Yom Kippur, to everyone's astonishment, the one who was the most modern army in the Middle East was not the IDF, which boasts of its innovation, the one who was innovative in terms of weapons on Yom Kippur was the Egyptian army! At that time, it had our [HNT Sagar missiles] and we didn't. He had anti-aircraft missiles and ours was very few. And he had "launch and forget" cruise missiles and we had no such thing. We once had a conversation about these things, whoever wants to can search in the archives. Today I don't know what he hides up his sleeve, but what I do know from the war of the last six months in Gaza, that the IDF probably has nothing to hide up its sleeve.
I don't know what Sisi is hiding, one thing is for sure he has at least 2,000 surface-to-surface missiles. I don't, I don't know what the IDF has, and does the IDF have 2,000 surface-to-surface missiles
[Egypt] has 100 surface-to-air missile batteries, I'm not sure the IDF has [such an amount].
Zeitlin: The IDF doesn't have a lot of anti-aircraft, it's well known, we have very limited anti-aircraft but that's fine.
Here's another thing that worries me the most in this whole story, it's the Egyptian Navy. Yes, he really has an advantage, I don't even know if it's an advantage [it's a correct term], he has total control. Absolute control, yes, we have no ability to answer the Egyptian navy, because our navy is really small compared to the Egyptian navy, it doesn't exist. Yes, so the question here is actually [will the Egyptians] be able to isolate us from a naval point of view, yes impose some kind of blockade on us?
Palm: That's what he's building! This is their goal. He is building himself [to return and be more successful than he prepared himself on Yom Kippur. Even then he succeeded in the Red Sea in preventing the supply of fuel to the State of Israel for months. He assigned us the Straits of Bab al Mandav. He tried to do the same thing already on Yom Kippur [also in the Mediterranean Sea] in the area of Crete, that is, far from our air force whose strength is known. They preferred to operate far away so our planes are less effective.
The Egyptian Navy now openly declares and says that its main goal is: A. to block shipping to us and B. to protect the oil and gas fields. Regarding his oil and gas fields, in my opinion he has no reason to invest power, because he has almost no active oil and gas fields worth protecting. It is true that Egypt claims to have oil reserves at the bottom of the sea that are not being produced. So to guard something that is 1000 meters under the sea, you don't need a navy. In practice, we supply gas to Egypt, and we would not have given them gas, it was now dark in Cairo. Even now there is already partial darkness in the streets of the city, due to the lack of gas and due to the desire to win dollars [for gas exports] there is no continuous lighting at night in Cairo.
So he has no gas, and his idea that he was working on, he built the port west of Alexandria, or rather in the west of Egypt near the border with Libya. There is no logical reason for building this port other than to operate far from the [Israeli] Air Force and block our shipping lanes. He can do the same thing by the way with his missiles, he has coastal missiles like [the terrorists] used in the Second Lebanon War and hit our Navy flagship. I forgot the name of the missile.
Zeitlin: It's a Jahont missile
Dekel: Yes, Yahunt something like that. Even today, from where he is currently sitting in El-Arish, he closes the port of Ashdod to us. But we still have Haifa [port]. But if he also makes the move of landing a marine division in Gaza, ostensibly to protect the Gazans from Israel, he may endanger the entrances and exits to our ports as well [and other strategic targets].
Certainly [his action] in the west and in the center of the Mediterranean from the regions of Crete from where he can act. Such an action could threaten our supplies, not only in ammunition and fuel, but also in food, all our supplies
Zeitlin: Yeah, [you're] really showing a picture of a strategic threat. We keep bringing it up, and it's very important in my opinion, because I'm not sure that people listening to you understand the magnitude of the Egyptian threat that exists right next to us. Once again, materialized not materialized is already a geopolitical question, but I think your arguments definitely have [room for concern] and should be taken into account. How will he react to the arrangements with Saudi Arabia if there are any? After the seventh of October we have to address the capabilities. There is enormous potential here! I don't think we should give them a military answer.
Dekel: With your permission, I would correct the [formula]. If we say capabilities, then we have to build ourselves against the possibility of Italy conquering us, that's a slogan. We can't [ourselves against abilities]. [I offer a more accurate formula], the catch in the exact formula is "capabilities in relation to infrastructure training in the field" if you take the component of the capabilities that we have already discussed and see that most of his infrastructure resources are in Sinai, he is not building any infrastructure to do anything bad to Ethiopia with its dam, nothing , there is nothing in the south. Even all the stories about his quarrels with Libya, in practice not a single company was added to the border with Libya. But in Sinai there are more tunnels and more bunkers and more bridges and a radar post and three airports, and 140 million liters of underground Egyptian army fuel.
That is, the real formula is "capabilities combined with infrastructure". And this is what is happening [in Sinai] there is an accelerated construction of infrastructure in Sinai, the construction of the roads that lead from the Suez Canal towards the "Green Line". Sisi, from the day he came to power, the first thing he did was turn it into a freeway. He paved the first highway from Ismailia, through Rafidim, to through Jebel Livni towards Keziot. [If he had cared about the development of Sinai] the highway should have ended in Al-Arish, the capital of Sinai. But [Sisi] chose to end the freeway at Katzeima, that is, with the option I call DPA B - to go towards Dimona.
[I would like to mention that the Egyptian army has doubled the number of its tank carriers. He had [before taking power] 990 carriers, now he has more than 1,840 tank carriers.
As I said at the beginning of the conversation, the new railway bridge that is about to be inaugurated in Firdan is a strategic change, it is the ability to transport supply tanks with the capabilities of a train, which is many times more than what is available in trucks, which must travel with profits. There is no distance on the train, each car is connected to the other. The distance between tank and tank is 4 meters or six meters. This allows a lot of power to be moved quickly
Zeitlin: Well Eli Dekel, I think the things speak for themselves. I hope it will reach the right ears, and maybe public pressure if there is, will oblige the decision makers to really consider what is happening in Egypt. Thank you very much.
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Thank you very much and once again many thanks to Eli Dekal
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