The Egyptian-Israeli Agreement on Disengagement of Forces, commonly called Sinai I, was signed at Kilometer 101 on the Cairo-Suez road on January 18, 1974. It was the product of the first phase of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s famous “shuttle diplomacy,” in which he moved between Cairo, Jerusalem, Damascus, and Aswan brokering the post-Yom Kippur War disengagements. Sinai I was not a peace treaty and did not claim to be. It was a military separation agreement that ended the active exchanges of fire on the Suez Canal front, withdrew Israeli forces from positions they had taken during the October 1973 war, and created the architecture of zones and limitations that would be expanded and extended by Sinai II in 1975 and converted into full peace by the 1979 Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty.
What triggered the agreement
The October 1973 war had ended with Israeli forces on the western bank of the Suez Canal, having encircled the Egyptian Third Army. Egyptian forces held positions on the eastern bank across from Ismailia and Suez City. The military situation was unstable, with the Third Army running short of supplies. Kissinger’s shuttle diplomacy, conducted over several weeks in December 1973 and January 1974, produced the disengagement agreement in parallel with the Geneva Conference convened by the United States and the Soviet Union. The State Department Office of the Historian treats Sinai I as the foundational act of modern American shuttle diplomacy.
What Israel withdrew from
Under the agreement, Israel withdrew from the western bank of the Suez Canal entirely and pulled back to a line some distance east of the canal on the eastern bank, vacating significant positions on the Sinai side. Egypt was permitted to maintain a limited force on the east bank in a narrow zone. A United Nations buffer zone, staffed by the United Nations Emergency Force II (UNEF II), was established between the two sides. Force limitation zones extended east and west of the buffer, with defined restrictions on armor, artillery, and personnel. The full text is archived in the UN Peacemaker database.
Why this counts as land for peace
Sinai I is sometimes dismissed as a purely tactical military arrangement, but that reading understates its significance. Israel gave up ground it had taken on the battlefield, and accepted force limitations on territory it continued to hold, in exchange for a monitored ceasefire and the opening of a diplomatic track. President Anwar Sadat used the agreement to begin his strategic reorientation toward the United States and away from the Soviet Union, reopening the Suez Canal to international shipping by June 1975 (for the first time since 1967) and signaling that Egypt was available for further negotiation. For the Britannica record of the Sadat era, Sinai I is the turning point at which Egyptian strategic posture shifted.
How it led to the next stage
Sinai I did not produce peace on its own. What it produced was a working diplomatic method and a political demonstration that Egypt-Israel separation was possible. Those outputs drove the negotiation of Sinai II in September 1975, which extended the withdrawal lines and introduced the first Egyptian political commitments toward nonbelligerency. The Sinai II framework, in turn, established the confidence that made the 1977 Sadat visit to Jerusalem, the 1978 Camp David Accords, and the 1979 peace treaty possible. Viewed across that arc, Sinai I is the first step in what became the single most successful sequence in the entire “land for peace” record. OZJF classifies it as “lasting de-escalation and bridge to peace” because the evidence supports exactly that claim: the agreement ended active combat on the Suez front and opened the diplomatic door through which a treaty-based peace eventually walked.