Israeli military occupies parts of Egypt’s Sinai, reports say
Egypt reopens Rafah crossingNew clashes flare up in Egypt’s SinaiMorsi fires top officials, Sinai governorMorsi replaces intel. chief, Sinai governorEgypt pounds gunmen hideouts in Sinai
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Roy Tov: Israel and Egypt Attack Sinai Insurrection
...the first time the Egyptian air force attacks in Sinai since 1973. The peace agreement between the countries forces Egypt to coordinate with Israel military moves in Sinai. The ongoing insurrection in Sinai is gathering momentum to such an extent that Egypt’s new Islamist government and the Zionists are cooperating in ways they never thought possible…
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Egyptian helicopters join battle against renewed Islamist attack
DEBKAfileExclusive Report August 8, 2012, 9:37 AM (GMT+02:00)
Egyptian attack helicopters went into action Wednesday morning, Aug. 8, firing missiles to break up pitched battles between Salafi Bedouin gunmen and the three Egyptian positions and checkpoints they attacked overnight at Sheikh Zuwayed east of El Arish. Witnesses report at least 20 Salafists killed and some Egyptian casualties among officers and men. Not just helicopters, but according to some reports Egyptian fighter jets also took off from El Arish airfield to beat back the Islamist offensive, the second in three days. It was the first time in the 39 years since the October 1973 Egyptian-Israeli Sinai war that Egyptian warplanes were deployed in the skies of the peninsula.
Sunday’s attack in which 17 Egyptian soldiers were killed and the Israeli border breached appears to have been the start of a general Sinai offensive by well-armed Salafi Bedouin gangs, adherents and followers of Al Qaeda. Northern Sinai has become their first battlefield.
Yet until now, debkafile’s military and counter-terror sources report that the regular Egyptian army has not initiated an offensive campaign against the Salafi gunmen proliferating in the Sinai Peninsula. While opting for a defensive posture, the soldiers were forced to fight back when they were attacked early Wednesday.
The army has in fact decided to focus on establishing a buffer zone around El Arish to sterilize it against assault. It has carefully avoided going after the Islamist terrorists’ strongholds at Jebel El Halal and Al-Mahdia, deep in the central Sinai mountains. Both house small training facilities where Bedouin fighters were instructed in the “arts” of coordinated terror tactics which they employed Sunday against Egyptian and Israeli targets.
The Israel Defense Ministry’s political coordinator Amos Gilead defined Salafi Bedouins’ goal in a radio interview Wednesday as being “to drown the Israeli-Egyptian peace pact in rivers of blood” while dragging the entire Middle East into armed strife.
According to debkafile’s sources, the Salafi gunmen who broke through to the Israeli side of the Sinai border Sunday in an armored truck packed with half a ton of explosives were not after an Israeli civilian location but the base of the IDF’s Bedouin Reconnaissance battalion nearby. They planned to repeat there the massacre they had just perpetrated at the Egyptian Mansoura base on the other side of the border.
Had they succeeded, the Salafist terrorists would have accomplished three strategic feats:
1. The first simultaneous terrorist attack on two armies. It would have toppled the Egyptian and Israeli security deployments along their common border in Sinai;
2. A mortal blow to the Bedouin unit, which is an important buttress of Israel’s combat array around the Gaza Strip;
3. Bedouin would have triumphed against Bedouin, so sparking a vendetta between the tribes of Sinai and the Israel Negev.
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Montreal Gazette: Deadly Gaza-linked Egypt border attack by militants could hurt Hamas effort to reopen crossing
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Egypt moves to seal Gaza tunnels after border attack
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PrisonPlanet: Sinai Islamists Attack Egyptian Border Outpost and Israeli Border Crossing, 16 Egyptian Police Dead, 7 Attackers
…To those who dismiss my prediction that the U.S. may join in such attacks, it is true that this would be an extremely sensitive and dangerous undertaking. Egypt is a central nation in the Arab world. To invade its sovereignty would be a radical new undertaking in the U.S. war on Islamism. But Obama has shown himself unimpressed with established precedent when it comes to U.S. counter-terror policy. Like George Bush and Dick Cheney, he’s predisposed to rock the boat when it comes to drone assaults against Muslim nations. At the very least, we can expect U.S. drone surveillance over Sinai just as we’re spying on Iran (remember the U.S. drone downed inside Iran?).
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YnetNews: Hamas’ Haniyeh blames Israel for Sinai attack
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Egypt’s MB accuses Mossad of Sinai border attack
DEBKAfileAugust 6, 2012, 6:46 PM (GMT+02:00)
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Egyptian president visits Israeli border, Egyptian Apaches land in El Arish
DEBKAfileAugust 6, 2012, 10:17 PM (GMT+02:00)
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Was Iran behind coordinated Islamist attacks on Egypt and Israel from Sinai?
DEBKAfileExclusive Analysis August 6, 2012, 9:22 AM (GMT+02:00)
The initial Egyptian and Israeli accounts of the attacks in which 16 Egyptian soldiers were killed and the Israeli border crashed Sunday night, Aug. 5, don’t match up: Egypt points the finger at the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip; Israel at Sinai Salafits. debkafile postulates a third option: Tehran put Gaza Strip Islamists and/or Palestinian proxies together with a Sinai al Qaeda cell for a coordinated attack on Egyptian and Israeli military targets to avenge the presence of al Qaeda in the anti-Assad revolt in Syria under the Western-Arab aegis. That would signal the spillover of the Syrian crisis into two more Middle East countries.
The gunmen first stormed an Egyptian commando post in Sinai with bombs, grenades and sidearms, killing at least 16 Egyptian soldiers, wounding many more and taking several hostages. A quantity of weapons and two armored vehicles were seized.
According to Egyptian sources, all ten gunmen infiltrated Sinai from the Gaza Strip through the smuggling tunnels. They were disguised as Sinai Bedouin.
In contrast, the Israeli military spokesman tagged the gunmen as Sinai Salafist Bedouin tied to al Qaeda. He denied there was any connection with the IDF’s targeting of two Popular Resistance Committees earlier Sunday after they were identified as the perpetrators of the June 18 shooting of an Israeli border fence workman.
The IDF also claimed it had been forewarned of the plot to attack the Kerem Shalom terminal opposite the Egyptian post and were therefore prepared for the gunmen’s incursion aboard two captured Egyptian vehicles for the purpose of snatching Israeli soldiers. Israel bombed the vehicle that got through from the air and by artillery. Seven terrorists were gunned down as they fled. There were no Israeli casualties.
The army spokesman did not indicate whether the Egyptians had also been forewarned.
The IDF version, if it is correct, exposes the most ambitious operation al Qaeda has ever mounted from Sinai. The jihadists, even in their biggest outrages in Iraq and Afghanistan – or Syria today – rarely carried through an operation this complex against one military base after another in two different countries.
Its features do, however, recall Palestinian terrorist strikes on Israeli military positions in the Gaza Strip at the height of their 2000-2003 war on Israel. In that sense, the Egyptian version pointing to Gaza as the source rings true. And indeed, the enclave’s Hamas rulers hastened to condemn the attack and block the Gaza-Sinai smuggling tunnels first thing Monday, Aug. 6, and a Hamas leader, Mahmoud A-Zahar, admitted Palestinians may have been complicit.
Neither Israel nor Egypt has mentioned a third option, which in the view of debkafile’s counter-terror analysts is the most sinister of them all, namely that Iran’s proxy in the enclave, the Palestinian Jihad Islami, which operates under the command of the Al Qods Brigades operations center in Beirut, was told to muster al Qaeda jihadists in Sinai for the coordinated attacks. Iranian officers posted in Beirut would then have orchestrated the combined operation, bringing to bear their long experience of setting up terrorist campaigns against Western and Arab targets – Saudi Arabia in 2003 and 2004; Iraq up to the present day and Afghanistan, against US and NATO forces.
If that is what happened, it would be the first time Tehran has harnessed al Qaeda to lash out out against Egyptian and Israeli military targets as a riposte for the presence of al Qaeda fighters in the revolt against Bashar Assad.
Just a few hours earlier, Iran’s Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani declared: “The fire that has been ignited in Syria will take the fearful (Israelis) with it.”
That was also the first time Tehran had explicitly threatened that the Syrian conflict would spill over into Israel.
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Terrorists crashed Israel border Sunday with three APCs – Updated Version
DEBKAfileAugust 6, 2012, 2:13 PM (GMT+02:00)
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Was Iran behind coordinated Islamist attacks on Egypt and Israel from Sinai?
DEBKAfileExclusive Analysis August 6, 2012, 9:22 AM (GMT+02:00)
The initial Egyptian and Israeli accounts of the attacks in which 16 Egyptian soldiers were killed and the Israeli border crashed Sunday night, Aug. 5, don’t match up: Egypt points the finger at the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip; Israel at Sinai Salafits. debkafile postulates a third option: Tehran put Gaza Strip Islamists and/or Palestinian proxies together with a Sinai al Qaeda cell for a coordinated attack on Egyptian and Israeli military targets to avenge the presence of al Qaeda in the anti-Assad revolt in Syria under the Western-Arab aegis. That would signal the spillover of the Syrian crisis into two more Middle East countries.
The gunmen first stormed an Egyptian commando post in Sinai with bombs, grenades and sidearms, killing at least 16 Egyptian soldiers, wounding many more and taking several hostages. A quantity of weapons and two armored vehicles were seized.
According to Egyptian sources, all ten gunmen infiltrated Sinai from the Gaza Strip through the smuggling tunnels. They were disguised as Sinai Bedouin.
In contrast, the Israeli military spokesman tagged the gunmen as Sinai Salafist Bedouin tied to al Qaeda. He denied there was any connection with the IDF’s targeting of two Popular Resistance Committees earlier Sunday after they were identified as the perpetrators of the June 18 shooting of an Israeli border fence workman.
The IDF also claimed it had been forewarned of the plot to attack the Kerem Shalom terminal opposite the Egyptian post and were therefore prepared for the gunmen’s incursion aboard two captured Egyptian vehicles for the purpose of snatching Israeli soldiers. Israel bombed the vehicle that got through from the air and by artillery. Seven terrorists were gunned down as they fled. There were no Israeli casualties.
The army spokesman did not indicate whether the Egyptians had also been forewarned.
The IDF version, if it is correct, exposes the most ambitious operation al Qaeda has ever mounted from Sinai. The jihadists, even in their biggest outrages in Iraq and Afghanistan – or Syria today – rarely carried through an operation this complex against one military base after another in two different countries.
Its features do, however, recall Palestinian terrorist strikes on Israeli military positions in the Gaza Strip at the height of their 2000-2003 war on Israel. In that sense, the Egyptian version pointing to Gaza as the source rings true. And indeed, the enclave’s Hamas rulers hastened to condemn the attack and block the Gaza-Sinai smuggling tunnels first thing Monday, Aug. 6, and a Hamas leader, Mahmoud A-Zahar, admitted Palestinians may have been complicit.
Neither Israel nor Egypt has mentioned a third option, which in the view of debkafile’s counter-terror analysts is the most sinister of them all, namely that Iran’s proxy in the enclave, the Palestinian Jihad Islami, which operates under the command of the Al Qods Brigades operations center in Beirut, was told to muster al Qaeda jihadists in Sinai for the coordinated attacks. Iranian officers posted in Beirut would then have orchestrated the combined operation, bringing to bear their long experience of setting up terrorist campaigns against Western and Arab targets – Saudi Arabia in 2003 and 2004; Iraq up to the present day and Afghanistan, against US and NATO forces.
If that is what happened, it would be the first time Tehran has harnessed al Qaeda to lash out out against Egyptian and Israeli military targets as a riposte for the presence of al Qaeda fighters in the revolt against Bashar Assad.
Just a few hours earlier, Iran’s Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani declared: “The fire that has been ignited in Syria will take the fearful (Israelis) with it.”
That was also the first time Tehran had explicitly threatened that the Syrian conflict would spill over into Israel.