Foreign Ministry source says Yasser Rida asked to explain Egypt Prime Minister’s remarks that peace treaty should be revised; earlier, Egypt military council said treaty should be preserved.
ed note–more Hollywood production here folks. IsraHell is not ‘worried’ about Egypt doing away with the ’79 peace treaty. She wants it done away with so that she has a causus belli to invade the Sinai and recapture it.
Haaretz
The Foreign Ministry summoned Egypt’s ambassador to Israel to a meeting on Friday morning, in order to clarify remarks made by Egypt’s interim Prime Minister that the Israel-Egypt peace treaty should be revised.
A source in the Foreign Ministry said that Foreign Ministry Director General Rafi Barak requested clarifications over the remarks, especially considering previous contradictory remarks made by the Egypt’s military council that the peace treaty should be preserved.
Egyptian military and policemen stand alert as hundreds of Egyptian activists demolish a concrete wall built around a building housing the Israeli embassy in Cairo, September 9, 2011.
During the meeting, Barak told Egypt’s ambassador to Israel, Yasser Rida, that Israel was not satisfied that the Egyptian youth who took down the flag from Israel’s embassy in Cairo last week is being presented as a hero in Egypt, despite the fact that this act is against the international treaty to which Egypt is a signatory.
Tensions in Egypt-Israel relations heightened last Friday, when hundreds of Egyptian protesters broke down parts of a protective concrete wall outside the building housing the Israeli embassy in Cairo. During the attack, a protester pulled down the Israeli flag from the embassy building.
Although eighty Israeli members of staff, including Israel’s Ambassador to Egypt Yitzhak Levanon, had been evacuated from the building preceding the attack, six security guards and embassy workers were inside the building when the destructive demonstration took place.
It is still unclear when Levanon will return to the Cairo embassy.
and, more of the same…
Terrorism experts: Al-Qaida tightens grip in Sinai peninsula
Lawless frontier desert seen as threat to Israel; former detainees, not recruits, stiffen Sinai jihad.
Reuters
Though sidelined by pan-Arab democracy drives, al-Qaida may have found a firmer foothold in the lawless Egyptian Sinai where it poses a threat to Israel, experts say.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s counter-terrorism czar told an Israeli-hosted security conference this week Egypt’s political entropy had helped reinforce and arm Sinai radicals whose presence is tacitly acknowledged by Egyptian intelligence.
Al-Qaida’s new leader Ayman al-Zawahri being interviewed by Al-Sahab, the media arm of al-Qaida, on December 17, 2007, when he was still second to Osama bin Laden.
“Many jihadists were released from jail … bring(ing) into the area many years of experience, knowledge, courage and people who actually do not have anything to lose,” the official, Nitzan Nuriel, said in reference to prison breakouts that accompanied the fall of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in February.
He said such militants were flush with weaponry looted in civil war-ravaged countries such as Libya and Yemen.
“If you want to buy, today, a mortar or a machinegun or even a MANPAD (anti-aircraft missile), all you need is a few dollars and you get it,” Nuriel said. “The level of the threat is much more dramatic than it was a year ago.”
The assessment was echoed by analysts gathered at the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Centre event, though they emphasized the overall sapping of al-Qaida’s popularity among Arabs.
“The common wisdom is that al-Qaida has been weakened by the Arab Spring when you make a global assessment, on an ideological basis,” said Lorenzo Vidino of the Centre for Security Studies at ETH Zurich. “But I would have to concur that on a tactical level they have benefited in places like the Sinai.”
Visiting Egypt last month, Vidino said, he had heard “virtually the same assessment from the remnants of the Egyptian security forces, which are concerned with their own security”.
Frank Van Beuningen, counter-terrorism chief for the Dutch Foreign Ministry, said he largely agreed with Israel’s concern.
Arab pro-democracy movements had augured non-violent reform but also left “spaces where there is no government authority and it is pretty hard for us to know what is going on,” he said.
Egyptian succeeds Osama bin Laden
Previously, Israel’s al-Qaida worries focused on marginal support for the group in the Gaza Strip, whose Hamas rulers are also hostile to the Jewish state but have cracked down on the more radical Islamists to shore up truces and internal order.
Though al-Qaida blew up an Israeli-owned hotel and tried to shoot down an Israeli airliner in Kenya in 2002, its leader at the time, Osama bin Laden, generally placed the United States and its Western and Arab allies higher on his hit list.
Nuriel predicted that with Bin Laden’s killing by U.S. commandos and succession by Egyptian-born cleric Ayman al Zawahri, al-Qaida would try to rally more attacks on Israel.
Israel blamed Gazan gunmen for an August 18 attack which killed eight of its citizens along the Egyptian border, saying they came via Sinai and may have been helped by Jihadis there.
Five Egyptian troops were killed as Israeli forces repelled the infiltrators, triggering demonstrations in Cairo during which Israel’s embassy was overrun.
Evacuated to Israel, Ambassador Yitzhak Levanon told local TV those mobs were fuelled by the Muslim Brotherhood, a popular Egyptian political movement which is sympathetic to Hamas and has become more assertive under post-Mubarak military rule.
Nuriel said regimes like Egypt’s “don’t have now the attention to deal with all the jihadist problems because they have to protect themselves”.
Yet Alistair Millar, director of the Center on Global Counterterrorism Cooperation in Washington, warned against “conflating the gains that could possibly be made by the Brotherhood in Egypt with the sense that al-Qaida is somehow involved. The Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaida hate each other”.
Israel “may have a case” in arguing al-Qaida was stronger in Sinai, Millar said, “but to suggest the Arab Spring would create any uptick in popular support for al-Qaida is a step too far”.
The 1979 Israeli-Egyptian peace accord required Sinai to be demilitarized, but Netanyahu has agreed to requests from Cairo to deploy fresh forces as part of security sweeps there.
Israel is beefing up its own border garrisons and, under orders issued on Tuesday by Netanyahu, plans to complete a fence along the 200-km (125-mile) frontier by next September.
“International cooperation can reduce the threat a little bit (but) at the end of the day you need strong response forces along the borders,” Nuriel said.
