by Gideon Allon, Shlomo Cesana and Israel Hayom Staff
Egyptian army launches major offensive against jihadists in Sinai • Gas pipeline attacked for first time this year • Former head of Counter Terrorism Bureau: Let more Egyptian forces into Sinai, amend Camp David accords.
Foreign Affairs and Defense
Committee Chairman Avigdor Lieberman
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Photo credit: Yoav Ari Dudkevitch  |
The damaged gas pipeline, Sunday
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Photo credit: Reuters 
Israel should do all it can to help the new
secular government in Egypt beat the Muslim Brotherhood, even if that
means amending the Military Annex of the Camp David peace accords to
allow more Egyptian military assets into the Sinai Peninsula, the former
director of the Counter-Terrorism Bureau in the Prime Minister's Office
Brig. Gen. (Res.) Nitzan Nuriel said Sunday.
Speaking on Army Radio, Nuriel said a defeat
for the Muslim Brotherhood and its supporters in the Sinai would
reverberate across the Middle East, and would be of huge strategic
importance to Israel.
The Egyptian army is currently engaged in
battle with Islamists across the Sinai. According to Al Gomhuria [The
Republic], an Egyptian newspaper, the Egyptian military, accompanied by
warplanes, are battling "terrorists and jihadists elements" in the
Sinai. Al Gomhuria reported that the military presented its planned
operation to Mohammed Morsi when he was still president, but that the
latter rejected the idea "without offering an explanation."
Pointing to the increasing instability of
Sinai, Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee Chairman MK Avigdor
Lieberman (Likud-Beytenu) warned over the weekend that Jihadists in the
Sinai Peninsula are taking advantage of the current turmoil in Egypt to
stage attacks on Israel.
"What is transpiring in Egypt should in no
doubt be worrying us," he said. "This is our largest neighboring
country, the first one we signed a peace agreement with, and clearly
instability over there carries implications for the entire region. It is
in our interest for Egypt to be stable and in full control over its
territory.
A Salafi terror group took responsibility for
rocket fire on Eilat on Thursday. The Sunni extremist group Jamaat Ansar
Bayt Al-Maqdis stated in a message from its Sinai base that the group
would continue to target Israel.
"Jews, enemies of Allah, are those who are
responsible for what is happening in Egypt and their long arm is to
blame for the current situation," the statement said. "We bombed them to
scare them and let them know that Allah is with us."
In addition, a new Islamist militant group calling itself Ansar al-Shariah in Egypt announced its formation amid the chaos.
The group said it would gather arms and start
training its members, in a statement posted on an online forum for
militants in the country's Sinai region on Friday and recorded by the
SITE Monitoring organization, Reuters reported.
The group blamed the events on secularists,
Egyptian Coptic Christians, state security forces and army commanders,
who they said would turn the country into “a crusader, secular freak.”
It denounced democracy and said it would
instead champion Islamic law, or sharia, acquire weapons and train to
allow Muslims to "deter the attackers, preserve the religion and empower
the sharia."
Meanwhile, Israel believes that Hamas will
continue to maintain the cease-fire as it serves its own interests, an
Israeli defense official told Israel Radio on Saturday. According to the
official, this weekend's global jihad call to fight the Egyptian army
will "lead the army to take further action against Islamist elements and
make a determined effort to restore order."
Last week Egypt sealed numerous tunnels to
prevent arms smuggling from Sinai into Egypt that may destabilize the
mainland. The official said that while events in Egypt were a blow to
Hamas, the terror group would continue to maintain the cease-fire with
Israel as it is in its own interests to do so.
Meanwhile, Egyptian security officials say
suspected Islamic militants have bombed a natural gas pipeline to Jordan
south of the city of el-Arish in the Sinai Peninsula.
In addition to starting fires that were soon
put out, the attacks early Sunday on two points on the pipeline
disrupted the flow of natural gas, said the officials, who spoke on
condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the
media.
In January, suspected Islamic militants
attacked a police patrol along a Sinai pipeline, wounding seven
policemen. Though it had come under attack more than a dozen times in
the previous two years, Sunday was the first attack on Egypt's natural
gas pipelines in Sinai in over a year.
It was not immediately clear who was
responsible for the pipeline and checkpoint attacks or if they were in
reaction to the Egyptian army's overthrow of Morsi on Wednesday.
Gideon Allon, Shlomo Cesana and Israel Hayom Staff
Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=10503
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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