Israel Boosts Missile Defense in South Amid Sinai Chaos

Rockets Strike: Israeli police investigate aftermath of rocket attack in resort town of Eilat. Image by getty images
Israel has boosted its rocket defences near its southern border with Egypt to counter possible attacks from Islamist militants fighting security forces in Egypt’s Sinai peninsula, Israeli officials said on Tuesday.
Violence in Sinai has surged since the army ousted elected Islamist President Mohamed Mursi on July 3, with militants killing at least 20 people in almost daily assaults in the area.
“We hear reports every day of attacks there and our concern is that the guns will be turned on us,” Israeli Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon said. “We have indeed strengthened our deployment along the border.”
He was speaking on a visit to an “Iron Dome” missile defence system that was deployed last week in the southern town Eilat.
He said that since Mursi’s overthrow, Egypt had increased its efforts to curb militants who have exploited a security vacuum in the Sinai since the fall of President Hosni Mubarak.
“We can see much more effective activity of the Egyptian army and security forces there in the past few months and mainly in the past few weeks after the change in government,” Yaalon said.
With Egyptian security forces pressing the militants, Israel was expecting trouble, one Israeli official said.
“The assessment in recent days is that given the Egyptian crackdown in Sinai, the terrorist elements there will try to demonstrate their survivability and defiance by shelling us,” said the official, who asked not to be identified.
A rocket fired from Sinai landed in Israel earlier this month and its remnants were found in hills north of Eilat, a Red Sea resort that abuts Egypt to the west and Jordan to the east.
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
2X match on all Passover gifts!
Most Popular
- 1
Film & TV What Gal Gadot has said about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
- 2
News A Jewish Republican and Muslim Democrat are suddenly in a tight race for a special seat in Congress
- 3
Opinion Is this new documentary giving voice to American Jewish anguish — or simply stoking fear?
- 4
Opinion Mike Huckabee said there’s ‘no such thing as a Palestinian.’ It’s worth thinking about what that means
In Case You Missed It
-
Opinion Think every Palestinian in Gaza is Hamas? This week’s protests prove you’re wrong
-
Opinion A Palestinian Oscar-winner’s arrest shocked the world. For these Jewish activists, it was terrifyingly normal
-
Opinion In the Trump administration and Israel, a grotesque display of virility coupled with a loss of humanity
-
Fast Forward Cornell’s new Jewish president says he is ‘very comfortable with where Cornell is currently’
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
Republish This Story
Please read before republishing
We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:
- Credit the Forward
- Retain our pixel
- Preserve our canonical link in Google search
- Add a noindex tag in Google search
See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.
To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.