The Airfield At War: Sde Dov's Military Decades

During the Second World War the strip served as an RAF base, according to the airport history post sourced to Wikipedia and the research timeline. The repository does not list squadron numbers, sortie counts, or runway extensions under British command.

The same coastal piece also held Pinchas Rotenberg's Reading Power Station from 1938, later recorded as a secret Haganah weapons factory in district coverage. Air power and clandestine industry therefore shared the northwest shore before statehood.

Readers should treat RAF service as a recorded phase, not as a fully documented order of battle in this file.

In December 1947 the strip became home to the first Haganah and Israel Air Force squadron, months before independence, according to the airport history post. A field carved as a civil alternative had become the pad from which a state that did not yet exist flew its first organised air unit.

The typed timeline does not name the squadron number or aircraft types in its summary line. The date and the "first squadron" claim are what the repository verifies.

That milestone sits at the beginning of Israel's air force story geographically on Tel Aviv sand, not at a remote desert base.

Civil and military use never fully separated, in the airport history post's wording. For decades the air force kept a presence on the field even as scheduled domestic flights used the same runway.

By the late operational years the public face of the airport was the Eilat shuttle: 703,649 passengers in the final full year on the timeline. Military movements did not disappear from the strip because scheduled passengers dominated the public story.

Photographs of late-era approaches show a city hard against the fence. Military aircraft and civil turboprops shared a short coastal runway with no room to relocate either function inland.

The housing fight of the 2010s treated the air force as a tenant with a price. On 6 June 2015 the state paid the Defense Ministry about one billion shekels so the army would leave before the original timetable, according to the timeline.

The repository does not publish which units vacated first or where they relocated. The fiscal fact on the record is the payment and its purpose: accelerate military departure from the strip while civil aviation continued for years afterward.

That transaction is a military-land precedent on the same coast now marketed as RAMI migrashim. The journal piece on ILA patterns treats the wider model; here the point is operational: defense exit had a dated invoice.

On 26 February 2016 the Supreme Court postponed final evacuation to January 2019, locking a legal end date for the 81-year field. Operations continued past that January. The last flight left 30 June 2019.

The final IAF sortie at closure went to Hatzor, recorded on the timeline beside the last civil departure and Eilat's 400 million shekel compensation for losing the hop. ITN covered the official close.

Runway demolition began 31 July 2019. On 10 February 2020 district records report IDF and civil evacuation complete after 81 years. Military use therefore ends in the record with a sortie destination named, then with an evacuation report, not only with a passenger terminal closing.

Demolition kept one structure: the control tower, described as a historic building on the timeline. Plan TA/4444's Runway Park preserves the old alignment and that tower at the heart of the new neighborhood, according to district magazine coverage summarized in the glossary.

PFAS compounds from firefighting foam, disclosed in February 2026, are a military-aviation residue rather than a commemorative one. The environment journal thread owns the contamination detail. It belongs in any honest military operational epilogue because defense and civil firefighting used the same strip.

The tower and the foam chemistry are two different inheritances from the same decades of air use.

The table lists only military-operational claims the repository dates. It excludes tender results and tower marketing.

Where the file gives a month but not a day, the prose above keeps the uncertainty. Where only a phase is named without numbers, the table says so.

The repository does not catalog every exercise, alert, or deployment from Sde Dov across the twentieth century. RAF squadron identities, IAF aircraft types on the December 1947 milestone, and post-2015 unit relocations after the billion-shekel payment are all absent.

This article therefore does not describe battle orders, wars fought from the strip, or comparative traffic with other Israeli bases. Those would require sources outside the verified corpus.

What remains usable is a dated skeleton: revolt-era opening, wartime RAF phase, first squadron month, dual-use civilian years, priced military exit, final sortie to Hatzor, and evacuation complete. That skeleton is enough to explain why closing the field was a defense negotiation as well as a planning vote.