Word: egypts
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Smuggling along Egypt's border with Hamas-ruled Gaza via underground tunnels has skyrocketed in the past two years, driven by an Israeli blockade on the Strip. Smuggled goods have become the Palestinian territory's only lifeline outside of aid and a valuable source of income to Sinai's marginalized Bedouin. But from a security standpoint, the trade is a round-the-clock law-and-order concern - particularly guarding against the transport of weapons and persons - and one that Mwafi says yields daily intercepts and arrests. "We are always in a situation because we are near Gaza and Israel," says...
Indeed, the governor likens his Egypt-Gaza border to the U.S.-Mexican border, and his security challenges to U.S. terrorism challenges. That may be a stretch. Gaza, a tiny, densely packed territory fenced in by Israel and run internally by the militant Islamist group Hamas, is hardly Mexico. But North Sinai's significance in the broader scheme of Egyptian national security is huge. Egypt fears spillover from Gaza's internal crises and has warned of foreign-terrorist infiltration via the tunnels. Asked about a recent protest outside a state security center by several dozen Bedouin women who were demanding trials...
...Bedouin in Sinai are Egyptian and have been for as long as Sinai has been Egyptian - but that hasn't quieted a modern history fraught with tension and mutual distrust. Cairo has received sharp local criticism in recent months for its construction of a new subterranean barrier along Egypt's Gaza border, meant to cut off smuggling. Analysts say the heightened crackdown on the lucrative underground trade, coupled with years of harsh treatment and sweeping arrests by security forces after terrorist attacks on Sinai beach resorts in 2004 and '06, has increased tense exchanges between security forces and the local...
...precedent for worse: in November 2008, violence erupted after police killed three Bedouin during a protest; Bedouin retaliated by kidnapping 25 police officers and overrunning a police post. In 2007, Bedouin protesters set fire to the ruling-party headquarters in Al-Arish.) (See the line of political succession in Egypt...
...despite a cold peace between the two states for the past three decades, intense animosity toward the Jewish state continues to dominate the Egyptian national consciousness. To the authorities of North Sinai, then, the sheer notion that there were Bedouin willing to side with Israel over Egypt constituted nothing short of the most serious treason. "Journalists should depend on official sources," declared Mosaad Arug, a member of the North Sinai local council, in a meeting convened to confront TIME's reporter about the story. "The people you met are not in charge and should not be trusted." More than...