Multi-heavy mineral separation techniques like density, magnetic, and electromagnetic techniques are followed by picking, grain counting, and mineralogical examinations conducted with an environmental scanning electron microscope (ESEM). These techniques have been applied to several drill hole (well) composite samples representing beach sand and dunes of East El-Arish area, North Sinai, Egypt. The results explain the remarkable enrichment in total heavy minerals (THM) of beach sand (4.4%) compared to sand dunes (2.6%): this is due to the natural concentration of the currents of the Mediterranean Sea. After characterizing the heavy minerals in terms of the abundance of each mineral species, the mean values of content relative to total economic heavy minerals (TEHM) were determined as 70.03% ilmenite, 3.81% leucoxene, 3.03% magnetite, 8.7% garnet, 10.6% zircon, 3.13% rutile, 0.37% monazite, and 0.31% titanite in the sand dune samples. The total economic heavy minerals in the beach samples were 64.08% ilmenite, 1.6% leucoxene, 2.84% magnetite, 18.16% garnet, 10.4% zircon, 2.18% rutile, 0.61% monazite, and 0.13% titanite. Monazite, thorite, zircon, and apatite are the main radioactive minerals in the study area. The combination of two specific characteristics of the studied monazite (relatively high Th-U content and high frequency) makes monazite the main contributor to radioactivity of the study area. © 2023, The Author(s).