Debka-file started reporting at 9:38 a.m. GMT today that early today,
- American forces and equipment withdrew from the Multi-force Organization base at Al Gura northeast of al Arish. This force monitors Sinai’s demilitarization under a key clause of the Egypt-Israel peace treaty. Washington and Cairo are discussing evacuating the entire base and its 400 multinational personnel. The Egyptian high command was informed that Hamas had begun moving some of its elite units to its new stronghold. Egyptian forces are not capable of contending with this strength or the hundreds of thousands of Gazan Palestinians on the move between Gaza and Sinai since Hamas blew up the concrete border fence Tuesday.
If true– and I have no reason to doubt that it is– then this is huge.
The Multi-National Force and Observers (MFO) was created in 1979 as a US-led “coalition of the willing” force tasked with monitoring implementation of the 1979 peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. If the force is now being redeployed (=withdrawn) from the area bordering Gaza, that is already a major development. But now, in addition, Egypt and Washington are discussing evacuating the El-Gorah base, which is one of the MFO’s two main operating bases?
The political crisis in Cairo provoked by yesterday’s bust-out of Palestinians from Gaza into Sinai seems to be much deeper than I had previously thought.
(By the way, when I linked to a Debka-file report on the Gaza-Egypt situation in this JWN post yesterday, the URL there was the same as the URL linked to above. DF should understand that it’s confusing for readers when they almost completely change the content of a published file after publication! I imagine that very diligent readers who want to find the whole text of the earlier DF report could do so by searching through caches?)
My rule of thumb about DEBKA-file is not to believe anything they say unless it’s corroborated. Whoever runs that site has a tendency to publish rumor without differentiating it from fact, which means that although some of their reports are factual, it’s impossible to tell which without cross-checking other sources.
They lost all credibility with me the day they reported that Arafat was willing to settle for 65 percent of the West Bank. But that’s another story, both literally and figuratively.
BTW, if it is true that “Hamas had begun moving some of its elite units to its new stronghold,” then is north Sinai now Palestinian-occupied territory?
Do not rely too much on Debka file . It is a site designed to spread disinformation similar to the bureau established to dissiminate disinformation before the American invasion of Iraq. The scene of thousands of women, children, old and young palestinians flooding the borders towards Egypt was a scandal for the Israeli state in front of the world. it showed the extent that this state has reached in its unethicality . Those scenes proved that the state of Israel has no ethical problem in starving those thousands of civilian human beings to death and blaming it to the palestinians or someone else. No doubt you will read and hear a lot to distract attention and to lay the blame on others like Egypt or Iran or Syria or whatever.
Jonathan,
I tend to agree with you on both counts. Debka is a right-wing, settler propaganda site; not a source of reliable information, in my opinion.
I had also thought about the fact that it appears that Hamas considering Sinai to be the Palestinian “hinterland”, and their positioning troops there may constitute an occupation of sovereign Egyptian territory. Interesting turn of events.
BTW, this whole episode is far from the forefront of concern in Israel today. Much more attention is being given to the upcoming Winograd report.