After three weeks of fighting, a ceasefire found Israeli forces entangled with the Egyptian and Syrian forces. This presented President Richard Nixon and Kissinger with an opportunity to play a lead role in disengaging these armies from one another and possibly laying the groundwork for further steps to peacefully resolve the year conflict.
In January , Kissinger helped negotiate the first Egyptian-Israeli disengagement agreement in eight days, and in May, he arranged a Syrian-Israeli disengagement after a month of intense negotiations. The negotiations would center around three key items: first, where the forward line of each army would be located; second, the size of the zones where armor was to be limited; and third, the types of armor to be limited in these zones.
Furthermore, Israel desired Egypt to reconstruct cities along the Suez Canal so as to ensure that the danger to Egyptian civilian populations would deter Egypt from starting another war. Kissinger shuttled between Israel and Egypt for a week, reaching an agreement on January The highlights of the agreement included limited Egyptian and Israeli forces divided by a U.
Egypt also agreed to most of the assurances that Israel had requested. Following the conclusion of this Egyptian-Israeli disengagement agreement, commonly known as Sinai I, U. Unlike the relatively short negotiations that led to the Egyptian-Israeli disengagement agreement, negotiations for a Syrian-Israeli disengagement proved far more arduous and took much longer.
With a need to show progress in negotiations between Israel and Syria before then, Kissinger moved forward in laying the groundwork for another shuttle. Through the end of March and most of April, Kissinger met separately in Washington with Israeli officials and a senior- level Syrian emissary to discuss the groundwork for negotiations.
