ISRAEL HAS deployed tanks to its border with Egypt after an Israeli civilian was killed in a cross-border raid, along with two militants.
Following the attack, four Palestinian militants were killed in Israeli air strikes in the Gaza Strip.
Yesterday’s infiltration from the Egyptian Sinai peninsula came as the Muslim Brotherhood claimed victory in Egypt’s presidential election, raising Israeli concerns that the new political climate in Egypt will mean an end to the relative quiet on Israel’s southern border.
The unidentified gunmen crossed into Israel from Egypt under cover of thick fog, some 30km south of the Gaza Strip. They fired an anti-tank rocket at an Israeli vehicle carrying construction workers and then opened fire with machine guns and detonated a roadside bomb.
A 26-year-old Israeli-Arab construction worker was killed in the attack, along with two of the gunmen who were engaged by Israeli troops. Israel believes a third militant managed to cross back across the border.
No group claimed responsibility for the attack, but Israeli security officials believe the perpetrators were linked to militant Palestinian groups in Gaza.
Four Palestinian militants, including at least two members of the Islamic Jihad military organisation, were killed in Israeli air strikes in Gaza following the border incident.
Israel is working against the clock to complete a security fence along its 266km border with Egypt, which runs from Gaza in the north to the Red Sea resort of Eilat in the south.
The civilian killed in yesterday’s attack was employed by one of the 100 contractor companies involved in the project, one of the biggest in Israel’s history.
Prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, speaking after yesterday’s attack, vowed to press on with the construction.
“This fence is designed to prevent both terrorism and the entry of African migrants. From our perspective, its construction is a supreme national interest. I believe that if we hadn’t decided two years ago to build the fence, we would be facing a flood of infiltrators and – no less than this – a flood of terrorism.”
Over the weekend, two rockets fired from the Sinai peninsula landed in southern Israel. Defence minister Ehud Barak spoke yesterday of “a worrisome deterioration of Egyptian control” over the Sinai, and called on Egypt’s new rulers to act swiftly to restore security to the peninsula and to uphold the peace treaty with Israel.
