April 21 1982 – 28 Nisan 5742
After a number of days in which residents of the Sinai desert capital, Yamit, barricaded themselves on the town’s rooftops with their supporters from the anti-evacuation movement, evacuation of Israel’s largest and most developed of settlement in the Sinai was completed and the town destroyed. Although the evacuation was part of the peace agreement signed in by Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, the events left a bitter taste. The last hours of the process included unpleasant confrontations between soldiers and families being uprooted from their homes, which in later years proved to have been only the prologue to further and even more painful evacuations as a result of the Oslo Accords and Ariel Sharon’s one-sided “disengagement” policy. Sharon also presided over the Yamit evacuation in his capacity as Defense Minister, partly because he was the only one Menachem Begin trusted to command the operation while avoiding outright blood-shed.
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