Israel fears that the current Egyptian government could be replaced with a repressive, hostile regime that causes regional instability.
Egypt could “fall into the hands of radical Islamists as a result of the country’s uprising,” Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said to a European delegation at the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, on Monday (Feb. 7).
Israel and the United States are concerned that the situation in Egypt could be “exploited” to provoke unrest around the Middle East and threaten Egypt’s relatively quiet border with Israel.
Incompatibility between Islamism and secular ‘liberal’ democracy is worrying experts around the Middle East, Al Jazeera News TV reported.
Although the protesters may have been seeking social reform at first, “in a situation of chaos, an organized Islamist body can seize control of a country,” Netanyahu said, Israel’s Haaretz reported.
Iran witnessed a revolution in 1979 in which Islamic forces quashed the opposition and moderate voices. The country has been under Islamic control ever since.
The world now fears that Iran is developing nuclear weapons in order to intimidate the West, Arab nations or possibly “wipe Israel from the map,” as Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has stated.
Iran-backed Hezbollah and Hamas are allegedly planning terrorist attacks in the Sinai Peninsula, the Egyptian region that borders Hamas-controlled Gaza.
A section of an Egyptian-Israeli gas pipeline was blown up by terrorists on Saturday (Feb. 5) in Sinai. Egyptian officials now say the bombing was carried out by four armed men and that the explosion halted gas exports to both Jordan and Israel.
There was fighting in Rafah, an Egyptian city that borders Gaza, on Monday (Feb. 7). Attackers, identified as members of the Islamic group Takfir wal-Hijram used rocket-propelled grenades and two people were injured, Palestinian Maan News Agency reported.
The attacks in Sinai over the past few days suggest that “provocateurs are trying to take advantage of the political turmoil in Cairo to spread unrest in Sinai,” The New York Times reported.
Egypt closed the Rafah-Gaza crossing because Hamas-members have escaped from Egyptian prisons into Gaza through illegal smuggling tunnels.
Sinai has become increasingly dangerous in recent years as Islamist groups have planned terrorist attacks and tried to attack, kidnap and terrorize foreign tourists there.
