Agence France Presse, August 10, 2012

EGYPT'S army has massed troops in Sinai in a campaign to quell increasingly deadly Islamist militants as Bedouin leaders pledged their help in a meeting with the interior minister. Military trucks carrying dozens of armoured personnel carriers mounted with machine guns rolled through the town of El-Arish heading eastwards, where Bedouin Islamist militants have established a presence in villages near the border with Gaza.

The build up came after state television reported that military helicopters and soldiers killed 20 militants on Wednesday in the first such operation in Sinai in decades, in retaliation for a militant ambush that killed 16 soldiers.  Israel said it gave Egypt the go-ahead to deploy helicopters in Sinai, easing the restrictions on military presence in the peninsula [....]

Also see:

On the Attacks in Sinai
By Issandr El Amrani, Arabist.net, August 6, 2012

The attack that took place yesterday on a checkpoint on Egypt's border with Gaza and Israel is a serious escalation of armed activity in the Sinai Peninsula, with a wide range of consequences on the young presidency of Mohammed Morsi, Egypt's relationship with both Israel and the Hamas government in Gaza, as well as the question of who controls Egypt's foreign and national security policy: the president, the intelligence services, the military, the ministry of foreign affairs, or all of the above (up till now, on diplomacy at least, Egypt had a dual foreign policy: one run by the presidency, another by SCAF/Intelligence — it was not going to last without some confrontation.)

This post serves as my initial notes on the incident [....]