Over the past year, Israel and Egypt have used a little-known, legally permissible understanding — the Agreed Activities Mechanism — to bypass restrictions on the number and type of Egyptian forces permitted in much of the Sinai. In doing so, they have made de facto modifications to their 1979 peace treaty without resorting to the diplomatically risky procedure of “reviewing” the treaty itself. As a result, considerable Egyptian army forces are now constantly deployed in central and eastern Sinai (Areas B and C of the peninsula, respectively), in a manner and scope never envisaged by the teams that negotiated the treaty more than three decades ago. Going forward, this new reality on the ground is unlikely to be reversed and is bound to have profound consequences for Egyptian-Israeli security cooperation, Cairo’s ongoing counterterrorism campaign, and the fate of Hamas in the neighbouring Gaza Strip.

TREATY VS. REALITY

The Military Annex of the 1979 treaty imposed strict limitations on the number of soldiers and type of weapons Egypt could deploy in the peninsula, as well as where they could be deployed. Specifically, it prohibited Cairo from stationing any military forces in Areas B and C other than lightly armed police or border guards. Since last year, however, the Egyptian military presence in these areas has often reached an order of battle approaching the size of a light mechanized division — in other words, roughly equivalent to the maximal 22,000 troops permitted along line A in western Sinai, an area not subject to the same stringent Annex restrictions.

Read the article in full at the Washington Institute.