In response to deadly attacks on its troops in the Sinai Peninsula, Egypt is creating a buffer zone between Gaza and Sinai, as it is convinced that Hamas played a role in planning and carrying out the attacks. This move, writes Tom Wilson, is an important step toward preventing the Sinai from becoming a lawless region rife with terrorists, of which there are already too many:
Egypt plans to create a buffer zone that will destroy some 680 homes—one can scarcely imagine the international reaction if Israel undertook such a security measure. . . . Today large parts of the Sinai have become . . . an ungoverned vacuum where al-Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood-linked groups have dug themselves in and established strongholds. . . . The problems in the Sinai have been dramatically compounded by the peninsula’s proximity to another area of unstable statelessness: Gaza. When Israel withdrew in 2005, Gaza was theoretically handed into the care of the Palestinian Authority, but as some on Israel’s right had already predicted, it did not take long before the power vacuum created by the absence of the IDF was replaced by the militiamen of Hamas. The same, of course, had already happened after the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon, as the non-state actor Hizballah entrenched its position in the area, turning it into a kind of Iranian backed fiefdom.
Read more on Commentary: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2014/10/29/sinai-terror-shows-the-danger-of-ungoverned-places/