Recent Arab Guerrilla Attacks Point Up Sinai Security Problems : Border Incursions Into Israel Put Egypt on the Spot

Although they have not said so publicly, Egyptian officials are deeply concerned about Israeli allegations that Palestinian guerrillas have begun launching operations against Israel from across the Sinai border with Egypt.

Until last December, when an Israeli patrol thwarted an infiltration attempt near the frontier town of Rafah in the Gaza Strip, the border had been virtually trouble-free following the end of Israel’s phased withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula in 1982.

Since December, however, there have been at least three incidents in which, according to the Israelis, guerrillas have crossed or tried to cross into Israel from the Sinai.

The first of these occurred on Dec. 1, when an Israeli patrol exchanged gunfire with several armed men caught trying to cut a hole in the fence near Rafah. Two months later, on Feb. 5, the Israeli army captured three guerrillas who it said had crossed over from Egypt the day before.

Bus Hijacking

The most serious incident, however, occurred earlier this month when three heavily armed Palestinians hijacked a bus carrying workers to Israel’s top-secret nuclear facility at Dimona in southern Israel. The Palestinians killed one hostage before Israeli troops stormed the bus. In the ensuing shoot-out, the three terrorists and two more passengers were killed.

Israeli officials said that cigarette packages and other material evidence found in the clothing of the three men indicated they had come from the Egyptian side of Rafah, which is bisected by a barbed-wire fence into Israeli and Egyptian sectors, with several thousand Palestinians living in refugee camps on either side.

“Without doubt, this is a grave incident,” Gen. Yitzhak Mordechai, head of Israel’s Southern Command, said afterward. “I hope the Egyptians will lend a hand in preventing an escalation of infiltrations from their territory.”

Seen as Inevitable

Egypt’s state-owned media reported the incident in terms that sought to justify it by portraying the hijacking as the inevitable, if regrettable, consequence of Israel’s increasingly brutal attempts to quell nearly four months of Palestinian protests against Israeli rule in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. But, in a remarkable omission, the media did not comment on the Israeli assertions that the terrorists came from Egypt.

In private, senior military and diplomatic officials insist that Egypt’s silence on this point should not be construed as an admission of the Israeli charge.

They note that in the December incident, the identities of the men involved and their motives for attempting to cross the frontier were never ascertained. In the other two incidents, the evidence cited by Israel, the officials maintain, is circumstantial.

“The evidence consisted of things like Egyptian cigarettes found on the bodies,” an Egyptian Foreign Ministry official said. “But Egyptian cigarettes are available in the Gaza Strip, and the evidence could also have been planted to embarrass us and strain our relations with the Israelis.”

“And if they really did come from our side of the border, how did they get that far into a high security area?” the official asked, noting that the hijacking took place about 40 miles from the frontier and only a few miles from the Dimona plant.

Senior diplomatic sources who have discussed the hijacking with Egyptian officials voice a similar skepticism. However, they add that these officials are deeply worried about the allegations and are still investigating them.

“The Egyptians aren’t saying they (the Palestinians) came from here, but they are taking it very seriously,” one Western diplomat said. “It has them worried. They’re worried now about the border and about their ability to police it.”

Senior Egyptian military officers concede that the 135-mile-long Sinai border is far from impenetrable, but they resent Israeli suggestions that this is Egypt’s fault. They note that, under the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, Egypt is permitted to maintain only a small force of border policemen along the frontier, most of which is unfenced.

Additional security is provided by the 3,400-man Multinational Force and Observers (MFO), the 10-nation peacekeeping force that took the place of the U.N. Emergency Force in the Sinai after Israel began its withdrawal in 1982.

However, the MFO is thinly spread and will be spread even thinner as at least 300 troops are sent home later this year as a result of U.S. budget cuts. Moreover, the MFO’s job is not to police the border, but merely to observe and report military movements to both sides.

The security shortcomings being re-examined by both sides have existed along the border for years. Yet the border remained trouble-free due to what is understood to be a tacit agreement between Egypt and the PLO not to use the Sinai for infiltration attempts.

If the Israeli allegations are true, they carry disturbing implications for Egypt’s relations with both Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, whose largest group, Fatah, claimed responsibility for the March 7 bus attack.

Egyptian officials say that, in the wake of the bus hijacking, they contacted the PLO and received “assurances” that the hijackers did not cross into Israel from Egypt.

“In the absence of proof to the contrary, we are, for the moment at least, taking these assurances at face value,” one official said.

If this sounds Pollyanna-like, Egyptian officials say they must weigh the possibility that the PLO is lying against what, in their view, is the equally likely possibility that Israeli intelligence fabricated the evidence connecting the terrorists to Egypt.

“We can’t be sure the Mossad (Israeli intelligence) didn’t make up this evidence,” a senior Egyptian intelligence official said. The motive for such a fabrication, he suggested, might lie in Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s opposition to the Middle East peace initiative proposed by Secretary of State George P. Shultz. If Israelis can be made to distrust their peace treaty with Egypt, this theory goes, they may be less inclined to support proposals that call for them to trade land for peace with Jordan and the Palestinians.