Egypt's Brotherhood blames Sinai raid on Israel's Mossad
The attackers apparently forced their way into Israel with a captured Egyptian armoured vehicle before it was disabled
Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood has accused the Israeli spy agency Mossad of being behind Sunday's attack on an Egyptian checkpoint on the border with Israel.
Israel's foreign ministry has dismissed the allegation as "nonsense".
The attack left 16 Egyptian security officers dead. Israeli forces say they later killed at least seven gunmen who broke through into Israel.
Israeli and Egyptian officials have blamed the attack on Islamist militants.
A statement on the Muslim Brotherhood's website said the incident "can be attributed to the Mossad".
It said Israel had carried out the attack in an attempt to undermine the government of Egypt's Islamist President, Mohammed Mursi.
The allegation was echoed by Hamas, the Palestinian offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood that governs Gaza.
Analysis
Yolande Knell
BBC News, Cairo
Conspiracy theories are popular across the Arab world and suspicions of Israel often feed into them. Two years ago, the governor of South Sinai even blamed the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, for a series of shark attacks at Red Sea resorts.
However, the latest claims on the Muslim Brotherhood's website, Ikhwan Online, have much more serious implications. They come at a time when Israel and Egypt, bound by their 1979 peace treaty, are recalibrating their relationship following the fall of Hosni Mubarak.
Egypt's new Islamist President, Mohammed Mursi, has indicated he will uphold the treaty. However, the Brotherhood, whose political party he used to lead, is ideologically hostile to Israel, which it typically describes as "the Zionist entity".
On Monday, Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, accurately described how Sunday's bloodshed highlighted the "common interests" of both countries - the need to work together to solve mutual security threats. The Brotherhood's online comments make that a little more difficult.
"Israel is responsible, one way or another, for this attack to embarrass Egypt's leadership and create new problems at the border in order to ruin efforts to end the [Israeli] siege of the Gaza Strip," the group's prime minister in Gaza, Ismail Haniya, was quoted saying by the Reuters news agency.
Israel's foreign ministry spokesman, Yigal Palmor, denied the accusation, saying: "Even the person who says this when he looks at himself in the mirror does not believe the nonsense he is uttering".
Earlier on Monday, Egypt's state news agency quoted a top security official as saying that the attackers were "jihadists" who had infiltrated from the Gaza Strip.
A statement by the Egyptian military described them as "enemies of the nation who must be dealt with by force". The country has declared three days of national mourning for the dead officers.
Patrols have been stepped up in the Northern Sinai, and Egypt's Rafah border crossing to Gaza has been indefinitely closed as security forces hunt the remaining attackers.
The raid comes amid growing fears that jihadists have gained a foothold in the thinly populated area.
It happened at about 20:00 local time (18:00 GMT) on Sunday, when the sun was setting and the guards had stopped work for the traditional iftar meal, which breaks the daily fast during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.
About 35 masked gunmen dressed as Bedouin nomads opened fire on the border post, near the Rafah crossing, with guns and rocket-propelled grenades, killing 16 soldiers and border guards and wounding another seven, the Egyptian army said.
The gunmen then approached the Israeli border near the Kerem Shalom crossing with two vehicles, one of which exploded on the frontier, Israeli officials said.
But the second - an armoured personnel carrier - broke through and travelled about 2km into Israel before being disabled by the Israeli air force, according to the officials.
At least five people died inside the vehicle, while two were killed in a gunfight outside, according to Israeli media reports.
'Cowardly'
The aim was to target Israeli civilians, according to Israeli officials. Defence Minister Barak said a major attack had been averted, and called the incident a wake-up call for Egypt.
At an emergency meeting with military and security officials early on Monday, President Mursi condemned the "cowardly" attack and said the security forces would "take full control" of the Sinai peninsula.
Israeli officials believe a brand of radical Islamism is spreading among the tribesmen of the northern Sinai.
Islamist militants have been blamed for several rocket attacks against Israel and a cross-border raid that killed eight Israelis last year.
The rising violence in the area is a test of credibility for the government of President Mursi, the BBC's Kevin Connolly says.
Israel wants tighter security in the Sinai, but it does not want that to be achieved with a large increase in numbers of Egyptian troops near its border, our correspondent adds.
Egypt's military sent extra tanks and troops into the Sinai last year, under terms that had to be agreed with Israel under the 1979 peace treaty between the two countries.
LATEST UPDATE: 07/08/2012 - EGYPT - ISLAMIST MILITANTS - ISRAEL - MOHAMMED MORSI
Egypt holds military funeral for Sinai attack victims
Egyptian soldiers held a funeral on Tuesday for their 16 colleagues killed by alleged Islamist gunmen at a checkpoint on the Sinai border late Sunday. Hecklers turned out to accuse the Egyptian government of leniency with extremists in the region.
By FRANCE 24 (video)
News Wires (text)
AP - Egypt held a military funeral on Tuesday for 16 soldiers killed in an attack over the weekend by suspected Islamist militants in Sinai near the borders with Gaza and Israel.
The ceremonies were disrupted by hecklers who chanted against Egypt’s new Islamist leaders, who have condemned the attack but may yet face a backlash against their plans to relax restrictions on Gaza border crossings. Gaza is ruled by the Islamist Hamas group.
Mourners prayed for the dead at a mosque in an east Cairo suburb before the coffins, wrapped in Egypt’s red-white-and-black flag, were taken to a nearby square where a military ceremony led by Defense Minister Hussein Tantawi was conducted.
The military has said that 35 gunmen attacked an Egyptian border post, killing the 16 before commandeering an armored vehicle they later used to try to storm across the border into Israel. It has accused Palestinians from Gaza of aiding the gunmen, by firing mortar shells at a nearby border cross just as the gunmen were attacking.
The killers are believed to be part of a low-level Islamist insurgency that has been active in Sinai for a decade, and which is allied with al-Qaida-inspired groups of militants in both Gaza and Sinai.
Egypt’s President Mohammed Morsi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Gaza’s Hamas rulers come from a different Islamist political tradition than the Sinai militants. Mourners nonetheless appeared to hold them responsible for the deaths.
“The Brotherhood and Hamas are one dirty hand,” chanted some of the mourners.
Surprisingly, Morsi did not attend the funeral, though he flew to Sinai on Monday to look at the border region and familiarize himself with plans to combat militancy in the area.
Prime Minister Hesham Kandil did attend the funeral and was heckled by mourners, some of whom pelted him with shoes. Others held their shoes high, pointing their soles at him in a gesture of contempt, before he was whisked away by aides.
Kandil is not a Brotherhood member, but he is a devout Muslim said by some media reports to be sympathetic to the group.
Morsi has sought to reverse ousted leader Hosni Mubarak’s hardline policy toward Hamas, promising to ease the hardship endured by Gaza’s 1.6 million residents as a result of years of siege by Mubarak’s Egypt and his Israeli allies.
He has promised to open the Rafah border crossing - Gazans’ only gateway to the outside world _ round the clock and allow goods to move to and out of the coastal territory. With their shared enmity for Israel, Morsi and Gaza’s rulers had appeared ready to strike an enduring alliance that could only have alarmed many in an Israel already concerned by the rise of Islamists in Egypt.
But Sunday’s attack and the Egyptian military’s assertion of Palestinian involvement may already have undermined that prospect. If Morsi maintains close ties with Hamas now, he could come under criticism for prioritizing the Brotherhood’s agenda over the nation’s interests.
