Operation Horev, 1948: Israel drives the Egyptian army out of the Negev

On the night of 22 December 1948 Israeli aircraft bombed the Egyptian airfield at El Arish, in Sinai, and infantry of the Golani Brigade seized Egyptian posts on the road between Gaza and Rafah. It was a feint. The real blow was being readied far to the east, in the desert south of Beersheba, and within a week Israeli columns would be inside Egypt, Britain would be pointing to its treaty with Egypt and a message in the name of the President of the United States would be on its way to Tel Aviv. Operation Horev was the final campaign against Egypt in the war that followed Israel's birth, and it ended in the negotiations that produced the first of the 1949 armistice agreements.²

Background: the Egyptian front at the end of 1948

By December 1948 Egypt still held a long front inside the former Palestine Mandate. Its troops kept the coastal strip from Gaza to Rafah and a line of positions in the Negev, among them El Auja, today Nitzana, on the road that runs south from Beersheba to the Sinai frontier. Further north an Egyptian force was cut off around Faluja, besieged by Israeli troops.³

The United Nations had been trying to stop the fighting in the Negev all autumn. The Security Council adopted resolutions on 4 and 16 November calling on the parties to cease fire and negotiate armistice agreements, and another on 29 December. Ralph Bunche, the United Nations Acting Mediator, was waiting to bring the two sides to the table.⁴

Israel's leaders wanted the Egyptians out first. On 23 December David Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary that the purpose of the operation in the south was to defeat the Egyptian forces and drive them out of the country. The Palmach's own history gives the same aim in other words: to destroy the Egyptian bases and push their forces beyond the international border.⁵

Armies and commanders

The Israeli Southern Front was commanded by Yigal Allon. For Horev he had the Golani Brigade in the west and, for the main blow in the east, the 8th Armored Brigade and the Negev and Harel brigades of the Palmach, the strike force whose units did much of the fighting in the south.⁶

The Egyptian expeditionary force held its positions in two groups, one on the coast around Gaza and Rafah and one inland around El Auja, with armor and artillery and an air force flying from fields at El Arish and Rafah. Ben-Gurion's diary records Israeli raids on those airfields, and Egyptian Spitfires were active over the front.⁷

The battle in phases

The feint, 22 and 23 December. The operation opened in the west. The air force bombed El Arish and Rafah, the navy shelled the coast at Gaza and Rafah, and Golani took Egyptian posts on the coastal road, among them the one known as Post 86. The Egyptians answered by moving armor west to meet the threat, and Golani had to give up Post 86.⁸

Rain in the desert. The main attack was meant to follow at once, but winter rain fell on the Negev. Supplies could not be brought forward, and the start of the eastern attack was put back. The Palmach history speaks of wadis flooded by the rain and a delay of 48 hours; Ben-Gurion, on 24 December, wrote that the action planned for that day would only start the next.⁹

El Auja, 25 to 27 December. When the eastern attack came, the 8th Brigade and a battalion of Harel moved on El Auja by a difficult route from the east, while the Negev Brigade went for the Egyptian positions along the road from Beersheba through Bir Asluj. On 26 December the armored column was in front of El Auja. By 27 December the base was in Israeli hands, and with it the road back toward Beersheba.¹⁰ › 28 December in military history

Into Sinai, 28 to 31 December. The Negev Brigade and a battalion of the 8th Brigade then crossed the old international frontier into Sinai. They took the crossroads at Abu Ageila, seized at least one Egyptian airfield and pushed north toward El Arish. How close they came depends on who was counting: Ben-Gurion was told that the Negev Brigade stood ten kilometers short of El Arish, near its airfield, while the Egyptian war minister told the British that the Israelis were within ten miles of the town.¹¹

Turning point: the frontier and the treaty

Crossing into Egypt changed the war. Britain was bound to Egypt by the Anglo-Egyptian treaty of 1936, and on 29 December the British told Washington that if the Israelis had in fact crossed the frontier, Britain's obligations under that treaty would come into play. The next day London formally told the United States that it regarded the situation with grave concern. Royal Air Force aircraft began flying over the battle area to see for themselves, and a reconnaissance on 30 December found Israeli forces around Abu Ageila.¹²

Washington acted. On 31 December the American representative in Tel Aviv, James McDonald, brought Ben-Gurion a message in the President's name: Israel's forces had invaded Egyptian territory in a deliberately planned operation, Britain would act under its treaty unless they withdrew, and immediate withdrawal was the minimum requirement. Ben-Gurion answered that the forces had crossed the border in the course of a maneuver and had already been ordered back.¹³

The Israeli command had already begun to shift its weight from Sinai to the Egyptian line between Gaza and Rafah. By 2 January, the Israeli foreign minister and chief of staff later assured the Americans, every Israeli unit was out of Egypt. McDonald reported that the withdrawal had been abrupt and that the Israeli army had meant to raid El Arish and neutralize Rafah, a plan that matches the raid on the El Arish base in the orders Ben-Gurion summarized on 23 December.¹⁴

Aftermath: Rafah, the RAF and the cease-fire

The fight now moved to Rafah, the hinge between the coastal strip and Sinai. In the first days of January Harel and part of the Negev Brigade came up the road from El Auja toward Rafah from the south, while Golani attacked from the north and took strongpoints outside the town. Before the cease-fire some Israeli units crossed back onto Egyptian soil to cut the road between Rafah and El Arish, as the Israeli chief of staff admitted to the American air attaché on 9 January.¹⁵

At the same time both governments were accepting a way out. On 6 January Bunche informed the Security Council that Egypt and Israel had unconditionally accepted his proposal: a cease-fire in the Negev, followed at once by direct negotiations under United Nations chairmanship. After delays in the cables to Haifa and Tel Aviv, it took effect on 7 January.¹⁶

That last day brought the most dangerous incident of the campaign. On the morning of 7 January a flight of four Royal Air Force Spitfires sent to look at the Israeli positions near Rafah was shot down; in the afternoon a Tempest from a second patrol was lost as well. Two British pilots were killed and two captured. The British government said its aircraft had been under orders not to cross into Palestine and had been attacked without provocation over Egyptian territory. Allon's report from the front, copied into Ben-Gurion's diary, counted one plane brought down by fire from the ground and others by Israeli fighters, and two British pilots taken alive.¹⁷

In the House of Commons on 19 January the Secretary of State for Air conceded that Israeli troops on the ground might well have taken the British Spitfires for Egyptian ones, since Egypt flew the same type, while insisting that the Israeli pilots should have seen the markings. The Palmach history, for its part, says the British planes had been trying to signal the Israelis to stop fighting. In Washington the incident added urgency to the push for an end to the fighting.¹⁸

Legacy and memory

The talks opened on Rhodes in January, with Bunche in the chair at the joint meetings of the two delegations. On 24 February 1949 Egypt and Israel signed their General Armistice Agreement there, the first of the four armistices with Israel's neighbors that were concluded between February and July 1949.¹⁹

The agreement settled much of what Horev had fought over. The Egyptian force trapped at Faluja was allowed to go home: under United Nations supervision some 2,900 men were evacuated across the Egyptian frontier between 26 and 28 February. Egypt kept the coastal strip around Gaza and Rafah, and the armistice line was drawn around it.²⁰

El Auja, the base Israel had stormed in December, became a demilitarized zone from which both armies were excluded, and the seat of the Mixed Armistice Commission that was to supervise the agreement. It did not stay quiet: in the 1950s the zone figured in the complaints Egypt and Israel brought before the Security Council, until war returned to Sinai in 1956.²¹ › The Suez Crisis, 1956

For Israel, Horev was one of the largest operations of the war, and by the armistice the Egyptian army was gone from the Negev, holding on in the south only to the coastal strip around Gaza, which Israel's commanders had hoped to take. For Britain it left five lost aircraft, two dead pilots and a tense exchange in the House of Commons.²²