Israel Endorsing Egypt’s Sinai Crackdown, Hoping to ‘Pressure’ Hamas

Though internally Egypt seems to be primarily focused on cracking down on dissent, the major military crackdown in the Sinai Peninsula was the first and most high profile of their acts after seizing power in a coup last summer.

Military operations in Northern Sinai are supposed to be virtually impossible under a treaty with Israel, but the Israeli government has conspicuously looked the other way for military operations in the area, seeing them as a “message” to Hamas.

Israeli officials say they have an unprecedented level of military cooperation with the new Egypt junta, and that “both countries want to crush Hamas.”

Though the junta has used Hamas as the excuse for the Sinai offensive, they have mostly clashed with totally unrelated factions within the peninsula, and not particularly successfully, with an ever-growing operation against Sinai insurgents inflicting casualties well beyond what Egypt anticipated.