An exclusive report by the Reuters news agency says that Egypt’s military leaders plan to “undermine” the Palestinian terror group Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, after “crushing” the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, which was once outlawed in Egypt, then rose to power in elections in 2012, then was deposed and outlawed again by the military and interim regime.
The effort goes beyond security cooperation with Israel and is aimed at what the Egyptian military has long considered a threat to Egypt’s security and territorial integrity. Terror groups, including Hamas, had begun to operate more freely in the Sinai under the Muslim Brotherhood government. The fall of that government in 2013 was considered a severe political blow to Hamas in the geopolitics of the Middle East region as a whole.
Last year, Egypt’s commander-in-chief, General Abdel Fatteh el-Sisi, was named the top “non-Jew positively influencing the Jewish future” for his efforts in cutting off Hamas’s smuggling tunnels between Gaza and the Sinai desert, which are used to transport weapons and fighters. The Obama administration has withheld some aid to Egypt since the coup over the military’s harsh crackdowns, but its protests have largely been ignored.
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