[2] It was built on land in a 140,000 dunam (14,000 hectare) area from which some 1,500 Bedouin families of the Al-Ramilat tribes had been secretly expelled under the direct orders of the then-defense minister Moshe Dayan and Southern Command head Ariel Sharon.

When the order came to evacuate Yamit by force, many of the residents barricaded themselves inside their homes, while others climbed up to their roofs as soldiers broke down their doors.

[4] Before the establishment of Yamit, the area south of Gaza known as the Rafah salient had been home to Bedouin farmers who "tended almond, peach, olive, and castor-oil trees and patches of wheat.

[5] On January 14, 1972, without explicit instructions by the Israeli government,[5] Ariel Sharon ordered the expulsion of the Bedouins of the Rafah Plain, about 18 square miles (47 km2) of land in northeast Sinai, together with the razing of their orchards and the blocking of their water wells.

[6] 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.

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.

"[10] Local kibbutzniks were outraged by the destruction and, in consultation with the tribal chief, Suleiman Hussein Uda Abu Hilo, arranged for a human rights lawyer to appeal on their behalf.

[5] Some kibbutzniks, among them Oded Lifshitz, and Latif Dori, were also activists in the left-wing Mapam party and ran Rafiah tours to show Israelis the destruction that had taken place, and to bring to public attention the fact that the image of the Bedouin as nomads were inexact, and that their orchards were being bulldozed.

Their case was presented by a Mapam man, Haim Holzman, who argued that the evacuation had no legal or military rationale, and violated the Geneva Convention.

General Israel Tal gave a deposition arguing that the Rafiah Plain area had been used by terrorists, who had attacked Israelis, as a shelter.

Holzmann replied, arguing that Tal's maps showed terrorist attacks had been in decline, and the incidents enumerated lay outside the zone where the expulsion had taken place.

[12] While the case was still pending, Dayan secretly asked Tel Aviv architects Yehuda Drexler and Ze'ev Drukman to draw up a blueprint for the projected port town of Yamit.

One suggestion was that Sharon deliberately made the whole process more traumatic than it needed to be so that the Israeli public would refuse the dismantling of other settlements even for the sake of peace.