War of Attrition

The Battle of Karameh was fought on March 21, 1968 in the town of Karameh, Jordan, between the Israel Defense Forces and combined forces of the... Palestine Liberation Organization and the Jordanian Army. It was planned by Israel as two concurrent raids on PLO camps, one in Karameh and one in the distant village of Safi — codenamed Operation Inferno and Operation Asuta , respectively — but the former turned into a full-scale battle. The attacks were in reprisal for a series of raids by the PLO against Israel, mostly by the Fatah faction, which culminated in an Israeli school bus hitting a mine. Israel assumed that the Jordanian Army would ignore the invasion, but the latter fought alongside the Palestinians and inflicted heavy losses upon the Israeli forces. The Israelis withdrew at the end of a day's battle, having destroyed most of the Karameh camp and taken hundreds of prisoners. Both sides declared victory. On a tactical level, the battle did end in Israel's favor and the purpose of the mission was achieved. However, for the Palestinians it became a mythological victory that established their national claims.
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Operation Boxer was an aerial offensive undertaken by the Israeli Air Force along the Suez Canal in July 1969. The first major IAF operation since... the 1967 Six Day War, the operation signaled a new phase in the War of Attrition. Despite Israel's decisive victory in the 1967 Six Day War, there were no diplomatic efforts in subsequent years to resolve the issues at the heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict. In September 1967 Arab states formulated the "Three Nos" policy, barring peace, recognition or negotiations with Israel, and believing that "what was taken by force, will not be restored except by force", President Nasser of Egypt soon resumed hostilities along the Suez Canal. These initially took the form of limited artillery duels and small scale incursions into the Sinai, but by 1969 the Egyptian Army was prepared for larger scaled operations. On March 8 Nasser proclaimed the official launch of the War of Attrition, characterized by large scale shelling along the Canal, accompanied by pin-point sniping and commando assaults. Fighting intensified as summer approached.
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Rimon 20 was the code name of a planned aerial battle which pitted the Israeli Air Force against Soviet fighter pilots stationed in Egypt during the... War of Attrition. In the engagement, which took place on July 30, 1970, five Soviet flown MiG-21s were downed by Israeli F-4 Phantoms and Mirage IIIs. Contributing to the conclusion of a ceasefire, it was one of the final engagements of the War of Attrition. Egypt had launched the War of Attrition in the hope of wearing down Israel's hold on territories captured during the 1967 Six Day War. By the start of 1970, however, the Israeli Air Force had established complete aerial superiority over the front lines along the Suez Canal, and the launching of Operation Priha in January laid bare Egypt's inability to counter Israeli supremacy not only along the canal but in the Egyptian heartland as well. President Nasser of Egypt therefore turned to the Soviet Union for assistance. Nasser visited Moscow on January 24–25, 1970, and persuaded his hosts to expand Soviet assistance.
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Operation Raviv , also known as the Ten-Hour War, was a mounted raid conducted by the Israeli Defence Forces on Egypt's Red Sea coast during the War... of Attrition. Taking place on September 9, 1969, Raviv was the sole major ground offensive undertaken by the IDF against Egypt throughout the war. The operation saw Israeli forces masquerading as Egyptian troops and using captured Arab armor. As the War of Attrition raged along the Suez Canal in the summer of 1969, Israel was hard-pressed to find a solution to Egypt's superiority in both manpower and artillery. With Operation Boxer it had begun employing the Israeli Air Force as "flying artillery", yet these operations were under the constant threat of expanding Egyptian air defences. Furthermore, the static nature of the war meant not all of its assets, including its ground forces and their superior mobility, were being put to use.
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