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Before dawn Wednesday, the chief of staff of the ineffective U.N. Truce Supervision Organization, Major General Ensio P.H. Siilasvuo, discussed with Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan the problem of getting observers to the battle lines along the Egyptian front. Dayan then asked Siilasvuo, a Finn, to propose to the Egyptians a new cease-fire that would go into effect at 7 a.m. that morning. The Egyptians agreed.
Stinging Gesture. By this time, the Egyptian government fully realized to what extent it had blundered in underestimating the seriousness of the Israeli bridgehead on the west bank. But it was too late to change the course of battle; the Egyptian Third Army was, as Moshe Dayan put it, "technically blocked." In a particularly stinging gesture to the Egyptians, the Israelis announced that they would supply blood plasma to the Third Army, since the Egyptian government was incapable of doing so. The Israelis added that the encircled Arabs were in no immediate danger of dying from thirst or hunger.
Enraged by the sudden change in the direction of the war, the Egyptians blamed both the Israelis for cease-fire violations and the U.S. for continuing its shipments of supplies to Israel. Charged Ashraf Ghorbal, President Anwar Sadat's press adviser: "Israel is cheating on the ceasefire, and the U.S. is helping it to cheat." In midweek Sadat appealed to the Soviet Union and the U.S. to send troops to the Middle East to police the truce; he also demanded a return to the cease-fire lines that existed before the Israeli encirclement had occurred. Both requests were motivated, in large part, by his desperate desire to protect the Third Army. The Egyptians' plight was presumably the reason that the Soviet Union got tough with the U.S. last week, when it attempted to pressure Washington into forcing the Israelis to observe the ceasefire.
Blurred Lines. By week's end the first of 1,500 U.N. forces were arriving in Egypt to supervise the cease-fire—a particularly difficult job in the southern sector of the west bank, where the battle lines were blurred and forces were intermingled. Even as the observers began to tackle the problem of how to proceed with their mission, another fierce battle erupted along the canal as the Third Army tried once more to fight its way out of the trap.
But already, hundreds of thirsty and hungry Egyptian soldiers were walking out of the harsh, blazing desert with their hands up and handkerchiefs waving. From their east-bank positions, the nearest fresh water was 100 miles away; the water conduit from the west was held by the Israelis, who seemed determined to supply them with water only in exchange for surrender. At best, the ones who held out could probably expect to go through what Gamal Abdel Nasser, as a young major, was forced to do in 1949: to await an armistice, after which, by joint agreement, they can walk through Israeli lines to safety.
On the Syrian front, savage fighting persisted until the hour of the ceasefire. When it finally ended, the Israelis were in control of the strategic Mount Hermon, but their drive toward Damascus had been blunted in the final hours of combat by an Arab counterattack that pushed them back about seven miles. Compared with the continuing bloodshed on the Egyptian front, the ceasefire along the Golan Heights was holding reasonably well.