Eyeless in Gaza

Rico says Isabel Kershner has an article in The New York Times about yet more troubles, this time closer to Israel:

Attacks in recent days suggest that provocateurs are trying to take advantage of the political turmoil in Cairo to spread unrest in Sinai, the desert peninsula that lies between Israel and the main territory of Egypt, and near Saudi Arabia and Jordan.
Local news reports described a two-hour battle in the Egyptian half of the divided city of Rafah, at the border with Gaza. The reports said that Egyptian security forces, with the help of local tribesmen, repelled attackers wielding rocket-propelled grenades. Two people were reported injured. The attackers were identified as members of an Islamic group called Takfir wal-Hijra.
That attack came as an Egyptian investigator announced that a blast on Saturday at a north Sinai gas terminal was not caused by a gas leak, as some Egyptian officials had suggested, but was a bombing carried out by four armed men. The explosion temporarily halted gas exports to Israel and Jordan.
The investigator, Judge Abdel Nasser el-Tayeb, said the terminal’s guards had testified that the men had stormed the terminal in two cars, briefly restrained the guards, and then set off the explosives by remote control, according to The Associated Press.
Bedouin tribes, who have long complained of discrimination by the Egyptian authorities, have clashed with the security services in recent weeks, as the mass protests spread in Cairo and other Egyptian cities. Residents of the Palestinian half of Rafah reported hearing gunfire from the Egyptian side late last month in what they said were clashes between Bedouin and Egyptian forces.
Egypt closed Rafah’s Gaza crossing point, but several members of the Islamist group Hamas who escaped from Egyptian prisons during the tumult returned to Hamas-run Gaza via smuggling tunnels that connect the two sides of Rafah.
Egypt deployed two battalions to Sinai after securing the agreement of Israel. Limits were placed on the number and type of Egyptian security forces allowed into Sinai under the terms of the 1979 Israel-Egypt peace treaty.
In recent years, Israel has warned its citizens to avoid the Sinai Desert because of the threat of attacks or kidnapping by Islamic militants. Militants hostile to Israel and to the Egyptian and Jordanian authorities and the West have bombed resorts in southern Sinai.
In August, a rocket fired from Sinai hit the Jordanian resort of Aqaba, killing a taxi driver. Remains of another rocket were found at the time just north of the adjacent Israeli resort of Eilat.
In November, a Palestinian member of the Army of Islam, a group inspired by al-Qaeda, was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza. The Israeli military said at the time that the man had been involved in directing an attack against American and Israeli targets in the Sinai Peninsula, in cooperation with elements from Hamas.