page_title: Arish
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Arish / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Members of the Harel Brigade at el Arish airfield, December 1948. 2nd from left Uzi Narkis.
context_page_description: ʻArish or el-ʻArīsh is the capital and largest city of the North Sinai Governorate of Egypt, as well as the largest city on the entire Sinai Peninsula, lying on the Mediterranean coast 344 kilometers northeast of Cairo. It borders the Gaza Strip and Israel.
  ʻArīsh is distinguished by its clear blue water, widespread fruitful palmy wood on its coast, and its soft white sand. It has a marina, and many luxury hotels. The city also has some of the faculties of Suez Canal University.
  ʻArīsh is by a big wadi, the Wādī al-ʻArīsh, which receives flash flood water from much of north and central Sinai. The Azzaraniq Protectorate is on the eastern side of ʻArīsh.
context_section_description: The city grew around a Bedouin settlement near the ancient Ptolemaic outpost of Rhinocorura (in Greek "the place where noses (of criminals) are cut off"). In the Middle Ages, pilgrims misidentified [ no evidence for this claim ] the site as the Sukkot of the Bible. ʻArīsh means "palm huts" in Modern Standard Arabic. M. Ignace de Rossi derived Arabic name from the Egyptian ϫⲟⲣϣⲁ(ⲓ) Jorsha, "noseless", an analogue of Greek Rhinocorura.
  New fortifications were constructed at the original site by the Ottoman Empire in 1560. During the Napoleonic Wars, the French laid siege to the fort, which fell after 11 days on February 19, 1799. During World War I, the fort was destroyed by British bombers. It was later the location of the 45th Stationary Hospital which treated casualties of the  Palestine campaign. The remains of those who died there were later moved to Kantara Cemetery. 
  Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, proposed ʻArīsh as a Jewish homeland since neither the Sultan nor the Kaiser supported settlement in Palestine. In 1903, Joseph Chamberlain, the British colonial secretary, agreed to consider ʻArīsh, and Herzl commissioned the lawyer David Lloyd George a charter draft, but his application was turned down once an expedition, led by Leopold Kessler had returned and submitted a detailed report to Herzl, which outlined a proposal to divert some of the Nile waters to the area for the purpose of settlement.
  El-ʻArīsh Military Cemetery was built in 1919 marked the dead of World War I. It was designed by Robert Lorimer.
  On December 8, 1958, an air battle occurred between Egyptian and Israeli air forces over ʻArīsh.
  ʻArīsh was under military occupation by Israel briefly in 1956 and again from 1967 to 1979. It was returned to Egypt in 1979 after the signing of the Egypt–Israel Peace Treaty.
  In the Sinai mosque attack of 24 November 2017, 305 people were killed in a bomb and gun attack at the mosque in Bir al-Abd in al-Rawda, North Sinai near ʻArīsh.
caption: El-ʻArīsh airfield, World War II.
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