Miss Mabrouk of Egypt

Check the archives too - a lot of good stuff to enjoy. Me myself? Off to new adventures in the blogosphere, if time permits.

Wednesday, September 14, 2005

6,000 Mukhabarat to North Sinai


Kids, Sandmonkey, do not go to North Sinai / Rafah now. It can be dangerous.

Says Debka: Sealing the border to normalicy against the Palestinian masses will be too difficult says Cairo after Egyptian security police watched tens of thousands of Palestinians indulging in a wild rampage in and out of Gaza and northern Sinai for the last two days.

Therefore they want to scrap the deal they signed - to shut down the Rafah crossing for six months until proper security measures are installed. Instead, they want to keep it open, promising only to repair the breaches in the border wall and prevent Palestinian egress to Sinai.
According to Israeli security experts, that is, in effect: Only two days after its pull-out, Israel can be forced to let go of its insistence on security controls at the Rafah crossing and let the Palestinians get away with free passage.

The Egyptians also informed Israel that 5,000-6,000 secret police officers, members of the dread Mukhabarat, are to be deployed in Sinai to locate and send home the thousands of Gazan Palestinians, who took advantage of the bedlam at the open border to stay in Egypt.

As always with Debka, they appear very informed but their information is hard to verify. By quoting them, I'm probably making myself guilty of XYZ [think James Bond] in the eyes of those now heading to Rafah.