Operation Yoav: what Wikipedia removed
Operation Yoav was a 1948 Israeli military operation in the Negev Desert during the Arab-Israeli War. Through the 2010 snapshot the opening said ‘On October 28, 1948 soldiers from the 8th Brigade carried out a massacre at al-Dawayima.’ Today the opening does not mention this, though massacre survives twice in the body. A reader arriving now learns the operation’s military objectives, and not that Wikipedia’s own opening once stated that soldiers carried out a massacre during it.
The word “refugee” appeared 3 times in this article’s opening at its peak, in 2010. Today the opening carries none; the body carries 4. Checked against the full current article on 2026-08-01.
The tracked words, snapshot by snapshot
Section titled “The tracked words, snapshot by snapshot”| word | 2005 | 2010 | 2015 | 2020 | 6 October 2023 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| refugee | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| massacre | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| occupation | 0 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
Counts are of the opening paragraph only, the part most readers, search engines and AI training sets ever quote.
What was taken out
Section titled “What was taken out”- The spelling of the officer’s name it was named for, Dubnow, was reworded to Dubno.
- The statement that the 8th Brigade carried out a massacre at al-Dawayima is gone from the opening; the word survives twice elsewhere in the article.
How it opened then, and now
Section titled “How it opened then, and now”2005 (revision 16200739):
Operation Yoav (also called Operation Ten Plagues or Operation Yo’av ) was an Israeli military operation carried out between 15 October - 22, 1948 in the Negev Desert in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War . Its goal was to drive a wedge between the Egyptian forces along the coast and the Beersheba - Hebron - Jerusalem road and ultimately to conquer the whole Negev. Operation Yoav was headed by the Southern Front commander Yigal Allon . The force consisted of three infantry brigades, the Negev Brigade , the Givati Brigade and the Yiftach Brigade , an armored batallion from the 8th Armored Brigade and the largest artillery formation that had ever been available to the IDF at the time. On 18 October the…
2025 (revision 1292094354):
1948 Israeli military action Operation Yoav (also called Operation Ten Plagues or Operation Yo’av ) was an Israeli military operation carried out from 15–22 October 1948 in the Negev Desert, during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War . Its goal was to drive a wedge between the Egyptian forces along the coast and the Beersheba – Hebron – Jerusalem road, and ultimately to conquer the whole Negev. Operation Yoav was headed by the Southern Front commander Yigal Allon . The operation was named after Yitzhak Dubno, codenamed “Yoav” by his commanders in the Palmach. Dubno, a senior Palmach officer, was charged with planning and leading the defense of the kibbutzim Negba and Yad Mordechai. Dubno was killed in…
Related
Section titled “Related”- The drift report: what changed across all 61,944 watched articles
- The case file for this article, with every snapshot and every marked removal
- Who made the cuts: removals grouped by the account that made them
- The live article on Wikipedia
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