"In Egypt, Israel finds ally vs. militants; Jerusalem stays out of spotlight as strife builds" by Josef Federman | Associated Press, August 20, 2013
JERUSALEM — Israel is quietly and carefully watching the turmoil in neighboring Egypt while maintaining close contacts with the Egyptian military amid concerns that the escalating crisis could weaken their common battle against Islamic militants in the Sinai Peninsula, officials said.
Related: Slow Saturday Special: New Egyptian General a-Sissy
As the death toll in Egypt rises, this alliance has put Israel in a delicate position. Wary of being seen as taking sides in the Egyptian military’s standoff against Islamist supporters of the ousted president, Israel also needs the Egyptian army to maintain quiet along their shared border — and to preserve a historic peace treaty.
The 1979 peace treaty, Israel’s first with an Arab country, has been a cornerstone of regional security for decades. It has allowed Israel to divert resources to volatile fronts with Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories.
In other words, the quiet on the Egyptian front has allowed Israel to conduct other wars of aggression and oppression.
For Egypt, it opened the way to billions of dollars in US military aid.
In this time of austerity I want all that aid stopped.
Although diplomatic relations have never been close, the two militaries have had a good working relationship. These ties have strengthened since longtime president Hosni Mubarak was ousted in a popular uprising 2½ years ago.
What?
With both armies battling extremist jihadi groups near the Israeli border, Israeli security officials often say relations with their Egyptian counterparts are stronger than ever.
I'm sure that's why the Egyptians were protesting Morsi.
With so much at stake, Israel has remained quiet since the Egyptian military ousted Mubarak’s successor, Mohammed Morsi, on July 3. Morsi, who became Egypt’s first democratically elected president, hails from the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group considered the parent organization of Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip and is an enemy of Israel.
Israel has not commented on the past week’s bloodshed, in which Egyptian troops killed hundreds of Morsi’s supporters who were rallying against the coup.
Related: Egyptian Army Ends Morsi Protests
‘‘Israel does not have to support the [Egyptian] regime, especially not publicly. It is not our place to defend all the measures taken, this is not our business,’’ said Giora Eiland, a former chairman of Israel’s National Security Council.
That's why Mossad's Black Bloc is raising hell in the country. Israel's involvement in Egyptian affairs goes back to the Lavon Affair and the attempted sinking of the U.S.S. Liberty.
At the same time, Eiland suggested that international condemnations of the Egyptian military’s actions have been excessive. He said Israeli and Western interests are ‘‘much closer’’ to the interests of Egypt’s General Abdel-Fatah el-Sissi and his secular allies.
‘‘Even if we don’t share the same values, we can share the same interests,’’ he said. ‘‘The Israeli interest is quite clear. We want a stable regime in Egypt.’’
And one that does their bidding like Mubarak did all those years.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office declined to comment but Israeli defense officials confirmed that security cooperation with Egypt has continued over the past week.
The Israeli and Egyptian armies have worked closely in recent years to contain the common threat posed by Al Qaeda-linked groups operating in Sinai. These groups have stepped up their activities since Mubarak was toppled.
Yeah, WHO are those Al-CIA-Duh linked groups?
Under the terms of the peace accord, Egypt must coordinate its military operations in northern Sinai with Israel. The Israelis are believed to have granted every request by Egypt to bring additional forces into the region, as long as all operations were closely coordinated. An international force helps monitor the terms of the treaty.
The United States and European Union have criticized Egypt’s crackdown on Morsi’s supporters. President Obama has suspended a planned military exercise with Egypt, and Senator John McCain has led a chorus of voices urging a halt in military aid to Egypt.
Blah, blah, blah.
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One reason the Egyptian generals are so beloved by Israel:
"Egypt’s military shuts tunnels that aid Gaza; Hamas has used passages to ferry items to territory" by William Booth | Washington Post, August 26, 2013
RAFAH, Gaza Strip — Emad the smuggler was covered in dust, watching buckets of cement and gravel emerge on a crude trolley from the bowels of his tunnel beneath the Egyptian border.
He is one of the few still doing this kind of work.
In the weeks since President Mohammed Morsi was ousted in a coup and his allies in the Muslim Brotherhood were declared enemies of the state, Egypt’s military has shut down most of the tunnels that serve as a lifeline for Hamas, the Islamist political and militant group that rules the Gaza Strip.
‘‘The army now runs Egypt and the army hates Hamas,’’ said Emad, who declined to give his full name because the tunnels are, at least technically, illegal. ‘‘They could care less what happens to Gaza.’’
Under Morsi, hundreds of tunnels were allowed to flourish.
Just ONE MORE REASON he had to GO!
Now there are a few dozen. So fuel prices in Gaza are soaring. Orders for steel and cement go unfilled. Projects to repave roads, build public housing and repair infrastructure in the enclave have stopped.
Meaning Gaza is now back under siege, and no outrage from the world community.
Egypt’s new military-led interim government is hostile to Hamas, which was born of the Muslim Brotherhood in the late 1980s.
That's a lie.
Related:
Flashback: Israel Helped Create Hamas
Why Would Israel Create Hamas?
Btw, Hamas also foiled a COUP ATTEMPT, and that couldn't have enamored them with western eyes!!!
Also see:
Six Zionist Companies Own 96% of the World's Media
Declassified: Massive Israeli manipulation of US media exposed
Oh, now my jewspaper makes perfect sense!
Hamas was ecstatic when Morsi was elected Egypt’s president. But with its close ally now detained at an undisclosed location, the movement is finding itself more isolated than it has been in years.
Time for another aid flotilla.
With the closing of the smuggling tunnels, long lines of idled cars await the sporadic opening of gas stations. Electricity, always dodgy here, especially in the heat of summer, has become even more unreliable because of the lack of fuel to run the generators. And forget about speciality items. Only a few Mercedes-Benz sedans are moving through the underground corridor these days.
Many of the tunnels were dug after Hamas took power in Gaza in 2007 and Israel and Egypt responded by closing borders. Over time, Israel and Egypt again opened crossings to the territory.
Though it is now possible to move goods into Gaza through the Israeli-controlled Kerem Shalom crossing, Israel restricts certain items it says can be diverted to terrorist activities — concrete and irrigation pipes, which Israel said could be used to make bunkers and rockets.
Children's coloring books and crayons also make the list.
With the opening of Kerem Shalom, which is operating at half capacity, Gazans could get most of their goods via Israel. But instead, they use the tunnels for fuel, cooking oil, and building materials — and some luxury items — that are cheaper in Egypt because they are subsidized by the government or banned to import by the Israelis.
Honestly, I'm tired of Jewish propaganda and the Israeli narrative.
Hamas and other militant factions use tunnels to smuggle arms and personnel. Exactly why the Egyptian military closed so many tunnels, but not all, is unclear. Gazans assume they are being punished.
Egyptian authorities have been investigating allegations that Morsi conspired with Hamas during the country’s 2011 uprising against former leader Hosni Mubarak.
In Cairo, state and private media accuse Gaza’s leadership of stoking terrorism in the Sinai peninsula, where this month 25 police recruits were kidnapped by alleged militants and fatally shot on the side of the road.
I guess Israel will just have to take it back, huh?
Hamas said it had nothing to do with the attack on Egyptians in Sinai. ‘‘Egyptian security is very important to us,’’ said Ahmad Yosef, ex-adviser to Hamas boss Ismail Haniya. ‘‘We are in contact daily with the Egyptian intelligence services.’’
Yosef said Hamas has asked the Egyptian military to provide proof that Hamas has supplied weapons or fighters to the Sinai, ‘‘and they cannot.’’
Hey, who questions government lies anymore?
Last month, Hamas shut down two news bureaus in Gaza, because Hamas said they presented ‘‘false news’’ about the Islamist government’s role in Egypt. Saudi-owned Al Arabiya news channel and Palestinian Ma’an News Agency remained closed. Directors of the news outlets deny the charges.
If that were to happen here in AmeriKa the entire corporate news sector would be shut down.
Recently, a group calling itself ‘‘Tamarod Gaza’’ released a video calling for Nov. 11 protests against the Hamas government. ‘‘Tamarod,’’ meaning ‘‘rebellion’’ or ‘‘mutiny’’ in Arabic, is the same word used by the Egyptian youth movement that helped to topple Morsi.
Meaning they are nothing but an western intelligence agency creation and agenda-advancing controlled-opposition front. Hope you young Egyptians are enjoying the jail cells.
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"Israel drone strike kills 5 in Egypt" by Ashraf Sweilam | Associated Press, August 10, 2013
EL-ARISH, Egypt — An Israeli drone strike killed five suspected Islamist militants and destroyed a rocket launcher in Egypt’s largely lawless Sinai Peninsula on Friday, two senior Egyptian security officials said, describing a rare Israeli operation carried out in its Arab neighbor’s territory.
And Egypt didn't complain?
The attack came a day after Israel briefly closed its airport in the Red Sea resort of Eilat, close to the Sinai, in response to unspecified security warnings. Eilat was previously targeted by rocket fire from the Sinai.
Israel maintained official silence about the strike, suggesting that if the Jewish state was involved, it might be trying to avoid embarrassing the Egyptian military. An Egyptian military spokesman later denied the report, but did not provide another cause for the explosion.
Egypt’s official MENA news agency said an explosion destroyed a rocket launcher set up near the border to launch attacks against Israel, and at least five Islamic militants were killed. But it did not elaborate.
An Israeli drone attack in the Sinai could signal a significant new level of security cooperation between the two former foes following a military coup that ousted Egypt’s president, Mohammed Morsi, last month.
The military has alleged that Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood movement had turned a blind eye to Islamist militants in the Sinai.
Meanwhile, Morsi’s ouster, which came after mass protests demanding he step down, has triggered a rise in attacks against security forces on the peninsula, raising fears that extremists could exploit Islamist anger to spread their insurgency.
I've kind of about had it, readers, I'm sorry.
The Egyptian security officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information, said the Israeli attack was launched in cooperation with Egyptian authorities despite past insistence that the government would not allow other countries to use its territories to launch attacks.
Residents heard a large explosion Friday in el-Agra, an area in the northern region of the Sinai close to the border with Israel. The Sinai is also internationally renowned for its Red Sea resorts in the south.
The Israeli military said only that it was looking into the report after being contacted by the Associated Press.
The Egyptian security officials told the Associated Press that the drone had been flying over the site of the attack since early Friday.
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"Lawless Sinai could be omen for Egypt; Violence spreads as government, rebels still at odds" by Robert F. Worth | New York Times, August 11, 2013
SHEIKH ZWAYD, Egypt — Every night at dusk, the streets of this desert town near Israel empty out, and the chatter and thump of gunfire and explosives begin. Morning reveals the results: another dead soldier, another police checkpoint riddled with bullets, another kidnapping. In mid-July, the body of a local Christian shop owner was found near the town cemetery, his head severed, his torso in chains.
The northern Sinai Peninsula, long a relatively lawless zone, has become a dark harbinger of what could follow elsewhere in Egypt if the interim government cannot peacefully resolve its standoff with the Islamist protesters camped out in Cairo.
Laying the groundwork for an Israeli invasion, to come as the U.S. bombs Syria?
In the five weeks since Egypt’s military ousted the Islamist president, Mohammed Morsi, the endemic violence here has spiraled into something like an insurgency, with mysterious gunmen attacking military and police facilities every night.
Oh, "mysterious gunmen." Sure looks like Mossad to me.
Last week, the violence threatened to draw in Israel.
Uh-huh!
Israel briefly closed an airport at the Red Sea resort of Eilat Thursday after Egyptian officials warned about the possibility of militants firing rockets from Sinai. The next day, up to five militant suspects were killed and a rocket launcher was destroyed in an airstrike in Sinai, state news media reported, and there were unconfirmed reports that the strike was carried out by Israel.
The Sinai attacks have taken at least 62 lives, officials say, not counting the 60 suspects that Egyptian authorities say they have killed. There has also been a troubling rise in attacks on Christians, who are fleeing the area in large numbers.
Although the world’s attention has been focused on Cairo, where about 140 Islamist Muslim Brotherhood supporters have been killed in clashes with the police since Morsi’s ouster, the chaos in Sinai in some ways represents a more troubling prospect.
Why?
Unlike the Brotherhood, which has a longstanding commitment to nonviolence, the jihadists here are out for blood, and they appear to have been energized by the military’s reassertion of power.
What was that about nonviolence? And the U.S.-supported coup knocked them out, huh?
Some Egyptians fear a renewal of the kind of terrorism they suffered during the 1990s, especially if the military resorts to an even more forceful crackdown.
And cui bono?
The northern Sinai may be both a symptom and a cause of Egypt’s festering crisis: One of the military’s reasons for ousting Morsi was the belief that he was too soft on the jihadists here and saw them as potential allies. Yet the military, for all its warlike talk, seems unable to thwart the mysterious bands of gunmen who own the night.
That's because the "mysterious bands of gunmen" are COVERT INTELLIGENCE AGENCY OPERATIONS! That's why the government can't thwart them.
The military announced last week on its Facebook page that its counterterrorism operation over the past month in Sinai had led to 103 arrests, and the destruction of 102 tunnels, 40 underground fuel storage tanks, and four houses used by extremists.
You guys do know that information goes straight to the NA, right?
The reference to tunnels, presumably those used to smuggle weapons and goods into Gaza, tallies with the military’s routine suggestions that Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that controls Gaza, is involved in the violence. However, there is no evidence to suggest that is true.
But WHATEVER! Just let the conventional narratives and government myths take hold.
Most residents here say the authorities appear to be on the defensive, with soldiers and police hunkered down at their posts, suffering daily casualties.
Israel has got to get in there and save Egyptian lies, I mean, lives.
Although the attackers mainly hit the police and the military, a dozen civilians have been killed in the cross-fire, according to local hospital officials.
Jihadism has long been a problem in Sinai, which was under Israeli occupation from 1967 to 1982. The area’s independent Bedouin tribes have resisted full integration into the state, and smuggling and drug trafficking to neighboring Israel and Gaza have been rampant here for decades.
But the Egyptian state has contributed to the problem, local leaders say. “They treated us all as traffickers and criminals, and this marginalization made a fertile ground for terrorism,” said Sheik Abdelhadi Etaik Sawarka, a leader of one of the area’s tribes.
After the 2011 revolution in Egypt, the security services withdrew from Sinai, leaving a vacuum where armed Islamists thrived, and some foreign fighters filtered into the area. The militants also gained access to more sophisticated weapons from Libya after the civil war in that country, analysts say.
Those would be Al-CIA-Duh fighters, and another Libyan success story, 'eh?
There are persistent rumors that the fighters have acquired surface-to-air missiles that could threaten aircraft in Egypt and Israel, though these have not been confirmed.
Prepare yourself for the false flag downing of an Israeli airliner.
The identities of the attackers in Sinai remain mysterious: No one has claimed responsibility, and the Egyptian authorities have said little, helping to fuel conspiracy theories.
The HALLMARK of COVERT INTELLIGENCE AGENCY operations -- if that isn't too conspiratorial for you.
The biggest concern for the United States and Israel, said Michael Wahid Hanna, an expert on Egyptian politics and the military at the Century Foundation, is “the possibility that Egypt has lost control over what’s going on in the Sinai.”
Well, we better just invade and occupy to make sure it doesn't get out of control, huh?
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"Israel intercepts rocket headed toward resort city" by Isabel Kershner | New York Times, August 14, 2013
JERUSALEM — Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defense system intercepted a rocket that was fired from the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt and headed for the southern resort city of Eilat early Tuesday, according to the Israeli military, the first time the military shield has been used to protect the city.
See:
Israel's Iron Dome
Israel Gives Another Go at Gaza
Obama's Trip to Israel
He was just there to drop of the U.S. aid check that pays for it.
The rocket attack came at the height of the summer vacation season, when the city is packed with Israeli and foreign tourists. Witnesses told the Israeli news media that sirens went off about 1 a.m., and that booms were heard over the city as the rocket was intercepted.
Another mind-manipulating psyop!
Islamic militants operating across the Egyptian border in the southern Sinai Peninsula have fired rockets a few times at Eilat in recent years. So far, they have all fallen in empty spaces in and around the city, causing no casualties.
Yup. There aim is no better than the Gazan rocket squads.
An Islamic militant group calling itself Majlis Shura Al-Majahedin Fi Aknaf Bayt Al-Maqdis claimed credit for the attack, saying it was revenge for the killing of four of its fighters in northern Sinai on Friday, according to Israel Radio.
This is nothing but pure propaganda from the Israelis. I wonder how long their propagandists had to work to come up with that name. That also discredits any pro-Israel sentiment or defense out here in the blogosphere. All Israeli hasbara.
Some news reports from Egypt at the time said that the militants had been killed in an Israeli missile strike, possibly launched from a remotely piloted drone, and suggested that the strike had been carried out in coordination with Egypt.
The Israeli military and government have not confirmed or denied the reports, but Egypt has denied reports of Israeli attacks inside its territory.
The new Egyptian government is a liar?
An Iron Dome battery was deployed in Eilat last month against a background of rising tensions along the Israel-Egypt border.
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More Egyptian sucking up to Israel:
"Jihadi Salafist leader arrested
CAIRO — Egyptian authorities arrested the brother of Al Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahri, a security official said Saturday. Mohammed al-Zawahri, leader of the ultraconservative Jihadi Salafist group, was detained at a checkpoint in Giza, the city across the Nile from Cairo, the official said. He was allied with ousted President Mohammed Morsi, an Islamist whose supporters are now taking to the streets to protest the killings of its supporters in a security crackdown last week. The official, speaking anonymously, declined to give further details. Authorities said earlier that al-Zawahri had commanded insurgents in Sinai Peninsula."
Related:
"Here is a larger image of our supposed number 2 Al Qaeda. Rather odd design motif in that background cloth, all things considered." -- Mike Rivero of What Really Happened
Yeah, it sure is, but not surprising coming from a tool of the CIA and MI6.
Muslim Brotherhood Works For Israel- Why Am I Not Surprised?
After what I've seen I think he missed the mark on that one. The Egyptian generals are not on the side of the people of Egypt, that's obvious, and the treatment of the Brotherhood by the Jewish War Organ I call the Boston Globe calls into question their role as a tool of Israel. What were they supposed to do, all go home after the coup and forget about it? I'm scolded as an American for such things and am told to get out there!
I think he IS right about the Sinai, but that is a whole separate issue regarding a Greater Israel, and in that case the chaos does seem to be working toward that Israeli goal. Will have to seize the Sinai on national security grounds because of terrorists.
