Gunmen from Egypt’s Sinai peninsula attack Israeli workers, killing one
JERUSALEM — Gunmen who crossed into Israel from Egypt’s Sinai peninsula killed a worker assigned to build a border fence early Monday, and soldiers responding to the incident killed two of the assailants, the Israeli army said.
The attack some 20 miles south of the Gaza Strip, near the border community of Nitzana underscored Israeli concerns about worsening security conditions in Sinai, where government control has weakened since the Egyptian revolution last year.
Defense Minister Ehud Barak said the incident, along with the launching of two rockets at southern Israel over the weekend, indicated “a disturbing deterioration in Egyptian control of security in the Sinai.”
He said Israel expected the winner of last weekend’s Egypt’s presidential election “to take responsibility for all of Egypt’s international commitments, including the peace treaty with Israel and the security arrangements in the Sinai, and to swiftly put an end to these attacks.”
Egyptian Gen. Abdelwahab Mabrouk, the governor of North Sinai, the border province where the attack was allegedly launched, expressed doubt about the veracity of the reports.
“Sinai is secure and under control on our side,” he said, according to a statement carried by the state-run Middle East News Agency. “Any intruders are arrested immediately.”
According to Col. Avital Leibovitz, an Israeli army spokeswoman, the incident started at about 6 a.m., when three gunmen attacked two vehicles carrying laborers who had arrived to work on the border fence. The gunmen targeted the vehicles with an explosive charge, rifle fire and a rocket-propelled grenade, Leibovitz said.
Leibovitz said a vehicle hit by the explosive and by the gunfire overturned into a ditch, killing one worker, who was identified in news reports as an Israeli Arab. The army said no other workers were was injured.
Israeli troops on border patrol arrived minutes after the attack and traded fire with the assailants, two of whom were killed when a large quantity of explosives carried by one of them detonated, Leibovitz said. She said a third attacker fled back to the Egyptian side of the border, where other members of the attack squad allegedly remained. No soldiers were hurt.
Israeli farming communities and army bases in the border area were locked down after the attack as Israeli troops searched for additional infiltrators. Border roads were closed to civilian traffic.
The workers are employed by one of the companies contracted by the Israeli Defense Ministry to construct the 140-mile long border barrier of steel mesh and razor wire. The fence is still under construction, and the attackers crossed in an area where it is not yet complete.
Leibovitz said that it was still unclear from where the attackers – who she said were equipped with helmets, flak jackets, camouflage uniforms, Kalashnikov assault rifles and grenades -- had come. But she said the quality and amount of explosives and combat gear they carried were reminiscent of a deadly cross-border attack last August that Israel blamed on a small militant Palestinian faction in Gaza, the Popular Resistance Committees. In that attack, gunmen who infiltrated from Sinai attacked motorists on a border road north of the Red Sea resort of Eilat, leaving eight Israelis dead.Israel responded with an air strike in the Gaza Strip that killed six people, including the leadership of the Popular Resistance Committees.
Since then Israel has accelerated work on the border fence, which was originally planned as an obstacle to thousands of African migrants and asylum seekers who sneak across the border each year.
Despite decades of calm since Israel and Egypt signed a peace treaty in 1979, their desert frontier has become more volatile in recent months, as militants seek to use the Sinai area as a launching pad for cross-border attacks.
On Friday, two rockets that Israeli officials said were fired from Sinai landed in southern Israel. In April, at least one Grad rocket landed in Eilat.
Amos Gilad, a senior Israeli defense ministry official, said in a radio interview that extremist groups inspired by Iran and al-Qaeda were “trying to establish themselves in Sinai in order to undermine the government in Egypt and …carry out attacks in Israel in order to complicate relations between Israel and Egypt.”
Lawlessness in Sinai, where local Bedouin tribes have long complained of neglect and harsh crackdowns by the Egyptian authorities, also has increased since the revolution. Gunmen have attacked police posts and repeatedly blown up a natural gas pipeline that supplied Israel under a deal widely criticized in post-revolutionary Egypt. The gas shipments have since been canceled.
Bedouins in the Sinai have kidnapped tourists to use as bargaining chips to get relatives in prison released. Security officials also say arms smugglers have taken advantage of lax security in the area to smuggle arms from Libya.
Also Monday, an Israeli air strike killed two Palestinian militants from the Islamic Jihad group as they rode a motorcycle in Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip, local medical officials said.
A statement by the military said aircraft had targeted a squad of snipers that had fired into Israel recently, including a shooting at an Israeli farmer near the border with Gaza last week.
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