As part of the 1979 Egypt–Israel Peace Treaty, the first peace agreement between Israel and an Arab state, Israel agreed to withdraw entirely from the Sinai Peninsula in phases, completing the process in April 1982. The withdrawal required the evacuation of some 7,000 Israeli settlers, most controversially from the town of Yamit, which was demolished after residents were forcibly removed by the Israeli army. The Sinai's return, in exchange for peace and demilitarization arrangements later monitored by the Multinational Force and Observers, is frequently cited as a precedent for 'land for peace' arrangements. Egypt maintains sovereignty over the peninsula today, though a heavily restricted security zone remains in place under the treaty's annexes.
Under the Egypt–Israel Peace Treaty (1979), Israel agreed to withdraw fully from the Sinai Peninsula, occupied since 1967, completing the withdrawal by April 1982 and evacuating Israeli settlements, including Yamit.
Egyptian estimates and the 1976 census put Sinai's population at roughly 150,000-200,000, mostly Bedouin of the north and centre together with the towns of El-Arish and the canal-zone fringe; many had been displaced eastwards or to the Nile valley during the 1967-73 wars and returned after 1982. The Israeli settler population removed in April 1982, chiefly from the Yamit bloc, is usually given as about 5,000-7,000.
The staged Israeli withdrawal from Sinai under the 1979 treaty and the April 1982 evacuation of the Israeli settlements at Yamit and elsewhere caused no recorded deaths; resistance by settlers and their supporters was met with non-lethal force, and Israeli and Egyptian accounts do not differ on this. Israel demolished Yamit's buildings before handover, a matter of property rather than life.
Egypt, Israel