Israel’s Sinai Warning Reckons With Years of Quiet Approvals

Secretary of State Marco Rubio waived $320 million in military-aid conditions for Egypt on October 1, 2026. Israel still calls Cairo’s Sinai force a breach of the 1979 peace treaty.

The public clash began on March 3, 2025, when Defense Minister Israel Katz said Israel “will not allow violations of the agreement or disruptions to infrastructure.” The troops he was talking about did not appear overnight. Jerusalem spent years letting them in.

Why Israel Says the Sinai Limits Are Broken

Katz spoke at a ceremony marking the death of Menachem Begin, the prime minister who signed the treaty with Anwar Sadat. He called Egypt “the largest and strongest Arab country” and called the 1979 deal “a historic leadership decision that changed Israel’s reality and continues to do so today.” Then he drew the line on Sinai.

Yechiel Leiter, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, had already said the quiet part on January 28, 2025, in a briefing to the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. He said Egypt was in “a very serious violation” of the Sinai terms and that the file would be put on the table “very soon and very emphatically.”

There are bases being built, and they can only be used for offensive operations and offensive weapons. This is a clear violation.

Yechiel Leiter, Israeli ambassador to the United States, Conference of Presidents briefing

Israeli military officials later said Egypt posed no imminent threat. That split still sits inside the same government. Katz and Leiter made a political case. The army, in public, refused to treat Cairo as a war-next-week problem.

Yagil Henkin, a military affairs expert, told Israel Hayom the pattern was older than the speeches. Egypt would move forces first, he said, then ask for Israeli approval after the fact, “which was always granted.” Even after the ISIS fight faded, “the forces were never withdrawn.”

Zone C Was Written for Police, Not Armor

The 1979 treaty, signed in Washington on March 26, 1979, gave Egypt back the Sinai after Israel captured it in 1967 and fought there again in 1973. The price was a buffer. Annex I carved the peninsula and the Israeli side of the line into four security zones in Sinai, with hard caps on who could stand in each one.

THE 1979 SINAI FORCE CAPS

The treaty text is blunt on the strip that matters most to Israeli planners. It allows only civil police in Zone C, armed for ordinary police work. That is the belt that faces Israel and, at its northern end, Gaza.

The United Nations never fielded the force the annex named. Egypt and Israel, with the United States, signed a protocol on August 3, 1981, that created the Multinational Force and Observers instead. The MFO still runs checkpoints, patrols, and observation posts in Zone C and is supposed to verify the annex at least twice a month.

The whole design assumed a 61,000-square-kilometer empty approach. If Egypt ever rolled a large ground force east, the movement itself would be the warning.

Israel Spent a Decade Saying Yes

That warning system started to blur after 2011, when the Egyptian state lost its grip on northern Sinai and jihadist groups, later the Islamic State’s Sinai branch, turned the peninsula into a war. Cairo asked to send soldiers and armor into places the annex kept thin. Israel said yes, again and again.

Sami Turjeman, a reserve major general and former head of the IDF Southern Command, wrote at the Washington Institute in 2018 that Israel generally assented to extra forces from 2012, including large armored deployments, and extended those exceptions as needed. He also wrote that once the Sinai Islamic State branch was beaten, Israel should demand the extra force shrink back toward the treaty caps.

An Israeli official said in 2015 that it took one phone call from Cairo to authorize “whatever Egypt wants in Sinai,” against the military annex. The Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security later found that Israel signed off on most of the excess after the fact, to keep the anti-ISIS partnership intact.

HOW THE EXCEPTIONS STACKED UP

1. 2012: Cairo begins repeated requests for large armored forces in Sinai, and Israel generally approves and then extends the exceptions.
2. 2015: An Israeli official says a single phone call from Cairo is enough to authorize operations that the military annex would otherwise bar.
3. 2018: Turjeman warns that the extra force must come down once the Sinai Islamic State branch is defeated, or the buffer logic dies.
4. January 28, 2025: Leiter calls the Sinai file a very serious violation and says bases going up there fit offensive weapons.
5. March 3, 2025: Katz, at the Begin memorial, says Israel will not allow agreement violations or infrastructure disruptions.
6. September 21, 2025: Egypt’s State Information Service says the Sinai force is for borders, terror, and smuggling, under prior coordination.

Henkin’s account of the hardware matches that timeline. It started with two battalions, he said. It grew to tens of thousands of soldiers and dozens of tanks, some near Egyptian Rafah and some near old ISIS ground. Egypt also built bridges, roads, and large tunnels that, in his view, could move whole divisions from west of the Suez Canal into Sinai in hours.

Rafah Made Those Extra Troops Look Permanent

The Gaza war is what turned a tolerated exception into a public fight. After October 7, 2023, Cairo massed forces and thickened the Rafah barrier because it feared a Palestinian flight into Sinai. In May 2024, as Israel took Rafah, Egypt treated the IDF’s own heavy presence in Zone D as a treaty problem and raised Sinai troops to 40,000, with more armor around Rafah and al-Arish, according to the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security.

That 40,000 figure is a wartime headcount, not the Zone A cap of 22,000. The same study says forces in Zones B and C went from 4,000 to more than 20,000, with tanks and armored carriers, over fifty outposts and training camps, storage depots, and runways. New and expanded airfields at Umm Khashiba, Rafid, and al-Arish are part of that picture. JISS says the Umm Khashiba strip can take F-16s.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked Secretary Rubio in September 2025 to press Cairo over underground stores that Israeli officials believe could hold missiles, and over runways that could take fighters. The objection is no longer only how many infantrymen sit near Rafah. It is concrete that does not go home when a raid ends.

ISIS did not vanish on cue. JISS records a July 2025 attack in Rafah that killed 15 Egyptian soldiers, after which Cairo reinforced again. That gives Egypt a live counterterror argument. It also gives Israel a reason to say the emergency never sunsets.

The dual-use map makes the argument harder to unwind. Egypt has poured money into new roads and civilian projects across the peninsula, alongside Canal tunnels and bridges. A highway that serves towns also shortens the clock for a division. Turjeman’s 2018 warning reads, in 2026, like a memo that arrived late.

Egypt Says the Army Is Holding the Border

Cairo’s first detailed public answer came from the State Information Service on September 21, 2025, after Israeli officials took the Sinai list to Rubio. The statement did not give troop numbers. It did not discuss runways. It folded the whole file into borders, terror, and the treaty’s own coordination channel.

WHAT CAIRO SAYS THE FORCES ARE FOR

• Border security: The SIS said Sinai forces exist to secure Egyptian borders against all risks, including terrorism and smuggling.
• Prior coordination: It said the posture sits inside prior coordination with the parties to the peace treaty, which Egypt is keen to keep.
• Treaty record: It said Egypt has not violated any treaty or agreement throughout its history.
• Gaza red line: It restated Egypt’s rejection of a wider Gaza war and of any displacement of Palestinians onto Egyptian land.

That last point is the one Egyptian officials treat as existential. President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has spent the war warning that pushing Gazans into Sinai is a red line. The extra brigades near Rafah make more sense as a wall against people than as a surprise army aimed at Eilat, which is the reading Israeli hawks prefer.

During the past six years under the threat of terrorism we had to add additional forces in Zone C near Rafah, more than those agreed upon in the treaty, which usually happens in coordination with the Israelis. The U.S. is monitoring Sinai for any violations. We sent in military forces and equipment to counter terrorism. Suddenly, this is becoming a drama because Israel doesn’t want more military aid coming to Egypt.

Samir Farag, Egyptian military analyst, on Sada el-Balad TV

Former Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry, speaking in 2024, said Egypt would keep the treaty “as long as it remains reciprocal.” That word is doing a lot of work. Cairo argues Israel’s own Gaza-border posture, and any talk of emptying Gaza into Sinai, is the breach that justifies a thicker Egyptian line.

Held-Back Aid to Egypt Went Out Anyway

The United States is the treaty’s political guarantor, a backer of the MFO, and Egypt’s main military banker. Egypt has received about $1.3 billion a year in American military financing since the late 1980s, money that buys US-made weapons. A slice of that package is tied to human-rights conditions that a secretary of state can waive on national-security grounds.

Rubio did so in a letter to congressional committees dated September 21, 2026, covering $320 million in fiscal 2025 Foreign Military Financing. The State Department announced the waiver on October 1, 2026, saying it was “in the interest of U.S. national security” and citing Egypt’s “helpful role” since the US war with Iran. The department said the decision “reflects the importance of Egypt to U.S. national security interests, and the concrete security cooperation Egypt provides to the United States.”

Republican members had already floated, in early 2025, language calling the Sinai tank movements a substantial Camp David violation and a US responsibility as guarantor. They talked about a timeline for pulling Egyptian forces back. The October waiver went the other way. It paid Cairo for Iran diplomacy, not for thinning Zone C.

Egypt still mediates between Israel and Hamas when Washington needs a channel. That is the leverage Cairo brings to any Sinai conversation, and it is why a treaty argument that military officers treat as manageable keeps failing to produce a drawdown. Katz said the agreement exists. Leiter said the bases cannot be ignored. Farag said the extra Zone C battalions were coordinated. The MFO is still in the peninsula to count what those three statements cannot reconcile.

Rubio’s waiver did not settle the annex. It settled who writes the next check. The armor that Israel authorized to hunt ISIS, then watched stay for Gaza, is still in Sinai, and no capital has ordered it home.