Egypt is constructing a new railway to connect the Suez Canal on the Red Sea to the northern Sinai town of Taba near the border with Israel, a project that has raised alarm bells in Israel and prompted calls for tight supervision from Tel Aviv.
The railway, some Israeli media outlets have claimed, would change the demography of Sinai, for years considered a symbol of isolation on the border between Egypt and Israel.
It could also enable the flow of military logistics at high speed, consequently changing the entire regional equation, one Israeli media outlet warned.
Extending over 500 kilometres from al-Ferdan, the world's largest rotating bridge over the Suez Canal, to Taba, the new rail line is Egypt's new attempt to create the infrastructure necessary for the development of Sinai, a territory the size of Israel, Gaza, the occupied West Bank and Lebanon combined that has remained largely underdeveloped for decades.
An empty, massive expanse of desert on the Egyptian Israeli border was always viewed as a good sandy buffer against direct contact between the Egyptian and Israeli militaries, bolstering limits to troop deployments on the shared border between the two countries, ones enshrined in the Security Annex of the 1979 peace treaty, analysts said.
But an outsized buffer has come at a heavy cost for Egypt's national security, the same analysts added.
"My belief is that the lack of development in this area for year gave the chance for terrorist groups to take root and grow in it," remarked Gen. Ali Hefzi, the former governor of North Sinai.
Speaking to The New Arab, he added that terrorist groups exploited Sinai's sparsely populated geography because of the lack of services in it to expand.
"This is why development is becoming a prerequisite of security in this Egyptian territory," Gen. Hefzi said.
It took the Egyptian army and police a sizeable amount of resources to eradicate a branch of the Islamic State group that popped up in Sinai between 2012 and 2023 and wanted to establish an Islamic caliphate in this territory.
Thousands of Egyptian army personnel and policemen were also either killed or injured over the same decade, during which Egypt tried to uproot the group from Sinai, according to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.
Dual goals
Sinai remains generally empty, despite its huge size. Covering almost 6% of Egypt's overall space of 1 million square kilometres, this territory is home to around 600,000 people only.
In the past few years, Egypt accelerated the development of this territory, implementing agricultural and industrial development projects worth tens of millions of dollars.
The same projects also include a new network of roads and educational institutions that try to meet the needs of the territory's residents which have been complaining from the lack of services for years, observers said.
Apart from easing the movement of persons to and from Sinai, the project could also serve as an alternative backup to the Suez Canal for certain types of cargo, thus competing with old Israeli initiatives for a rail link between the Red Sea port of Eilat and the Mediterranean Port of Ashdod, Israeli media declared.
Having been discussed since 1950, the Eilat-Ashdod rail link would be Israel's first attempt to connect the Red Sea with the Mediterranean through an overland route.
According to initial plans, the core section of the project would run from Beersheba/Dimona in southern Israel through the Negev and Arava to Eilat, covering between 180 and 260 kilometres.
The project was approved by the Israeli cabinet in 2012, having received interest from China and other countries for construction and financing.
Egyptian specialists do not underestimate Israeli fears from the new rail link between Suez and Taba sabotaging the planned Eilat-Ashdod link.
The Egyptian project, they say, aims primarily to preserve the competitiveness of the Suez Canal route, contribute to Sinai's development, and protect Egypt's status as an international trade nod at a time of high rivalry.
"The Egyptian project will necessarily negatively affect the planned Israeli project," Wael Qadurra, a former deputy head of the Suez Canal Authority, told TNA.
Egypt's construction of the railway, he added, would make the Israeli project both "useless" and "unfeasible", even as its main objective remains to allow for a speedier transport of goods between Egypt's Red Sea and Mediterranean coasts.
Egyptian-Israeli relations at a critical time
The Egyptians are working round the clock to finalise the new Suez-Taba rail link which enjoys support from Sisi and is directly supervised by the minister of transport and the prime minister, according to Israeli media.
The line will pump economic life into Sinai's desert and strengthen Egyptian sovereignty in the region, it adds.
The basic part of the project is in place already, a 100-kilometre line between Suez and the North Sinai town of Bir al-Abd that has returned to work after a five-decade slump since the 1967 Egyptian-Israeli war.
On 30 September, Egyptian Minister of Transport Kamel al-Wazir highlighted the importance of transport and infrastructure projects in Sinai for development in this Egyptian territory.
Commenting on Israeli media reports about the new railway, he added that Egypt has the full right to develop each inch of Sinai.
"Sinai is an inseparable part of the Egyptian homeland," the minister of transport said.
"The primary goal of the road network and the railway [constructed in Sinai] is to serve residents and ease the movement of persons and goods," he told Egyptian television.
The construction of the new rail link comes, meanwhile, at a critical time for relations between Egypt and Israel, analysts said.
These relations are coming under renewed stress against the background of a number of regional developments, including Israel's procrastination to implement the Gaza ceasefire plan which was proposed by US President Donald Trump and approved in Sharm el-Sheikh in October last year, they added.
Israel is also expressing objection to the measures Egypt has taken in Sinai since 2023, including the deployment of additional troops in the border area, in what the Israelis describe as a violation of the Security Annex of the 1979 peace treaty.
However, this tension appears to be only one aspect of complex relations between Cairo and Tel Aviv.
An international newspaper has just revealed that Egypt's former intelligence chief Abbas Kamel visited Israel and met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu days ahead of the October 7, 2023 attacks by Gaza factions to warn him against the imminent attacks.
"Despite political differences and tensions between the two countries, they are capable of maintaining a minimum level of security and intelligence coordination," Gen. Hefzi said. "This coordination is important for finding solutions to problems that emerge between the two sides, not to mention security coordination on the shared border and coordinating aid entry into Gaza."
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