Yamit

On January 14, 1972, without explicit instructions by the Israeli government,^[7] Ariel Sharon ordered the expulsion of the Bedouins of the Rafah Plain, about 18 square miles of land in northeast Sinai, together with the razing of their orchards and the blocking of their water wells.^[7] The tribal sheikhs claimed 20,000 people were affected by the expulsion. Israeli army statistics put the number of expelled at 4,950. Those with tents were given a day to remove them. Those in concrete houses were given an extra day to leave, and their homes were reduced to rubble.^[8] Bulldozers, following a map design drawn by Sharon, drove down a swathe extending several dozen metres wide where the Bedouins were encamped, and smashed everything in their way.^[7] The decision to build Yamit was approved by the Israeli government in September 1973.

Settling northeastern Sinai was an idea strongly promoted by Moshe Dayan.^[9] The idea was subsequently proposed in a document on Israeli policy in the occupied territories written by Yisrael Galili, drafted to bridge the gap between hardliners and moderates in the Israeli Labour Party.^[10] According to one Israeli kibbutznik who visited the area immediately after the expulsion:

"A group of members from kibbutzim in the region, including me, started to investigate. We went out and toured the area, and were stunned by the dimensions of the wreckage, and by the number of persons who were expelled. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the government denied the facts that we presented, and claimed that they had merely evacuated a few nomads from state lands onto which the nomads had recently encroached."^[4]

The expulsion was not mentioned in the Israeli press. A month later, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross met and raised the issue with Dayan's viceroy in the territories, Shlomo Gazit, who knew nothing of it. The IDF chief of staff David Elazar, on being informed, flew over the area by helicopter to see for himself and subsequently appointed a commission to investigate what Ariel Sharon had done.^[11]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamit

Under orders from then-defense minister Moshe Dayan and Southern Command head Ariel Sharon, in 1972 the Israel Defense Forces secretly expelled 1,500 Bedouin families from the Al-Ramilat tribes, from a 140,000 dunam area. As Oded Lipschits wrote in a February 2002 column of the kibbutz movement journal Hadaf Hayarok, his memory of those facts was jogged when the IDF demolished houses in Rafah in 2002. Referring to what happened in the Sinai years earlier, he wrote, "A group of members from kibbutzim in the region, including me, started to investigate. We went out and toured the area, and were stunned by the dimensions of the wreckage, and by the number of persons who were expelled. The IDF and the government denied the facts that we presented, and claimed that they had merely evacuated a few nomads from state lands onto which the nomads had recently encroached."

An inquiry committee ultimately established that the expulsion was carried out without government authorization; Dayan had acted upon his own initiative. There were some censorious rebukes about "transgression of authority," and some low-ranking officers were demoted. Nonetheless, the Golda Meir government carried out a pre-prepared plan to build settlements on the very same region from which the Bedouins had been expelled. Lipschits wrote, "Sadat and top Egyptian officials wrote in retrospect that the Israeli government's decision to establish a large Israeli city [Yamit] was the straw that broke the camel's back, and caused Egypt to give up hopes for a peace agreement, and to initiate the Yom Kippur War."

https://www.haaretz.com