North Sinai plunged into darkness following suspected electrical tower attack, Israel gas pipeline targeted by militants for second time

On the evening of November 25, some 450,000 residents of North Sinai were thrown into total darkness until the early hours of the following morning, after three high voltage electrical towers collapsed near the city of Bir al-Abd in the west of the governorate. Residents from North Sinai’s six main cities found themselves cut off from the world as telephone networks and internet services went down.

While what caused the towers to collapse is yet to be confirmed, local sources in the Bir al-Abd area told Mada Masr that the city went dark immediately after residents clearly heard a series of loud explosions coming from the west of the city in the vicinity of the Nagah and Kharba villages — the same area in which the towers that fell down were located.

Clashes between the Egyptian Armed Forces and militants have caused damage to electrical towers in the past, leading to blackouts in cities across the governorate. For the entire governorate to be plunged into the dark unprecedented, as is the alleged targeting of electrical towers in the west of Bir al-Abd.

A source inside North Sinai’s public electricity sector told Mada Masr that a domino effect followed the collapse of the three towers, as an electrical grid on Egypt’s mainland west of the Suez Canal went out of service and the main transformer station in the city of Bir al-Abd went down as well, leading to a capacity overload at the steam plant in Arish — the second-largest source of electricity in the governorate — which also went offline.

Another source in North Sinai’s electricity sector described the blackout as “orchestrated” in comments to Mada Masr, saying that the three towers were brought down to cut the electricity off to the entire area. The source noted that three towers are not situated next to each other, and that they are responsible for mainstreaming six high voltage circuits from three networks into the transformer station in Bir al-Abd: two from Port Said, two from East Qantara, and another two from a small power plant in the area of Baluza. 

Until November, the biggest blackout to have affected the governorate came in September 2018 when the cities of Arish, Sheikh Zuwayed and Rafah, as well as parts of central Sinai, went dark for nearly a week after three electrical towers collapsed west of Arish. Residents have faced frequent electricity cuts — sometimes for hours in Arish, or days in Sheikh Zuwayed — while authorities have failed to propose any concrete solutions to avoid the recurrent crises.

For example, following the September 2018 blackout, authorities attempted to address the problem by bringing a diesel-powered electrical station from Sharm el-Sheikh. The source inside the electricity sector described the station as “run-down,” explaining that it first operated in Arish in the eighties before being moved south. According to the source, the plant was brought from Sharm el-Sheikh in 2018 to serve as a backup electrical source to restart Arish’s steam power plant when power is cut off as a result of damage to the main electrical line coming from mainland Egypt. 

However, when the governorate was hit with a blackout on November 25, the backup diesel-powered station’s operational teams were surprised to learn that one of their units was so run down as to be unresponsive. In spite of the best efforts of the maintenance teams, power was only restored to the city when an emergency line extending from Sharq al-Tafria was used to start up the grid. 

The threat of governorate-wide blackouts continuing as a knock-on effect of the collapse will persist until a concrete base can be constructed for the three towers, according to the source in the electricity sector.

One week prior to the blackout, on November 19, an explosion hit a gas line west of Arish on November 19. Residents of the city of Arish, 30 kilometers away from the explosion site, could see the flames, as could the residents of the city of Bir al-Abd, some 45 kilometers away.

Just two hours after the November 19 explosion, the spokesperson for the Armed Forces issued a statement describing the blast as “limited,” and identifying its location at Sebeika, west of the city of Arish. The military’s statement was followed by another from the governorate, which stated that the Egyptian Natural Gas Company was able to respond to the explosion quickly and switch off the control valve, adding that the explosion would not affect the supply of gas to people’s homes in Arish, the gas power plant, or the only natural gas station for vehicles in the area.

While both statements said that concerned agencies would investigate the cause of the explosion, the Province of Sinai got there before them to claim responsibility for bombing the gas pipeline using explosive devices. This is the second time the Islamic State affiliate in the peninsula has claimed to have attacked the pipeline passing through North Sinai since it was announced that natural gas would be imported from Israel in January, with officials announcing that a February explosion on the same pipeline had been caused by militants. The Province of Sinai also claimed responsibility for the February attack announcing it had targeted a pipeline connecting Israel and Egypt.

Two additional attacks took place in North Sinai in November without any official statements issued in response, or any party claiming responsibility. The first was the killing of a resident in late October in front of his farm in the village of Gelbana, an area on the Sinai side of the Suez Canal that falls under Ismaila’s administrative control. MP Gazy al-Owaida said the attack came in retaliation to the man’s cooperation with the Armed Forces and the police.

The second incident occurred on November 8 when Nabil Habashy Salama, a Coptic resident of the Ghazlan neighborhood in downtown Bir al-Abd was abducted in front of his house by three militants riding a private car, who then stole a pickup truck then retreated from the area.

Even with the abduction and explosions at the gas pipeline and suspected explosion that felled the electrical towers, there has been a relative lull in the Province of Sinai’s militant activity in areas in the vicinity of villages in Bir al-Abd in recent weeks. Though the group had previously been very active in these villages to the far west of the peninsula, militants have instead re-emerged in the areas of Sheikh Zuwayed and Rafah in the far east, where the group originally formed and developed.

In November, the Province of Sinai targeted multiple military targets in Sheikh Zuwayed, particularly in the coastal area. It claimed responsibility for IED attacks on several military vehicles, as well as targeting soldiers in their bases. The group released photos of these operations, as well as video footage of another firearms attack that targeted a border guard at a checkpoint in the city of Rafah.

Aside from attacks on the Armed Forces, the group has also continued to target civilians. After Sheikh Zuwayed resident Mohamed Abdel Salam Abou Iskanadar was abducted in October, the group released photos of militants executing the fisherman by firing squad days later. The Province of Sinai justified its actions by claiming that Iskandar was among a group of fishermen charged with transporting food supplies and fuel to military checkpoints along the coast of Sheikh Zuwayed in exchange for permission to fish in the sea.

The group claimed through the Islamic State-affiliated Al-Naba newsletter, that its militants had forced the Armed Forces to stop using military vehicles to transport supplies to these checkpoints after targeting them several times. According to the newsletter, this drove the military to use the fishermen to transport the supplies in their boats in exchange for permission to fish.

Armed civilians who fight alongside the Armed Forces have also recently been engaged as the combat once again moved to areas in Sheikh Zuwayed and Rafah where these civilian groups are concentrated. The Province of Sinai has recently declared itself responsible for two attacks. The first was on November 5 when an explosive device hit a joint patrol of armed civilians and military units in the village of Zaheer. The second was on November 19, which saw Province of Sinai elements set a trap for members of the Union of Sinai Tribes near the village of Barth, south of Rafah. The group claimed that it injured two people and destroyed a car, and released photos of heavy automatic weapons that it claimed it had captured from UST fighters following the attack.

For its part, the UST did not announce any of the November attacks against its fighters on its official Facebook page. As for the Egyptian Armed Forces, a December post on the official spokesperson's Facebook page claimed that 40 militants had been killed in military operations taking place between September 1 and December 8, adding that in the same period two officers, four non-commissioned officers and a soldier were "killed and injured." The UST, meanwhile, released a photo in October of a lieutenant colonel in the Armed Forces, expressing wishes for his recovery and that he was injured after being shot in the head by a sniper during a raid in North Sinai. A few days later, the UST published photos of four bodies on its website with automatic weapons and ammunition laid next to them, claiming they were among the militants who had been killed by the Armed Forces in the village of Qasrawit in Bir al-Abd.

Amid the clashes that have extended across all of North Sinai, authorities have been trying to restore a semblance of normal life to the governorate’s towns and cities.

In Bir al-Abd, the governorate reopened schools in the villages of Qatiya, Iqtiya, Merih and Ganayin after a lull in Province of Sinai activity in the area following the end of a two-month occupation of the villages, and as the threat of explosive devices left by the group receded after the Armed Forces discovered and detonated dozens of them with the assistance of residents.

Even though the governorate decided in mid-November to extend its suspension of schools in these villages for two weeks, it reopened them last week without issuing an official statement. A total of 17 schools in these four villages welcomed their students starting last Saturday.

In Sheikh Zuwayed, decisions issued recently by security agencies and other government bodies once again gave hope to the remaining families in the city, who are considered the most affected by the ongoing armed clashes in the governorate. The most important of these decisions was the opening of a number of roads that have been closed for years and paving a number of others. MP Ibrahim Abu Shaira released photos of sand barriers being removed and the opening of roads leading to several village communities in the lead up to their residents returning.

In downtown Sheikh Zuwayed, security agencies allowed the Sheikh Zuwayed Middle School for Girls to reopen after six years of closure since the Province of Sinai tried to take over the city in 2015. The school, which is located right next to the city’s main police station, was immediately closed following the 2015 attack.

The city of Arish has also witnessed some relief from a raft of stringent security measures. In October, a number of squares in the city were opened after five years of closure, helping to revitalize commercial traffic within the city after years of stagnation.

The governorate also announced last Sunday that on April 25 next year — the governorate’s national day — the industrial area to the south of Arish would be reopened. The statement said that LE18 million was allocated to rehabilitate the area’s roads and infrastructure, as well as to provide it with six new electrical transformers.

While North Sinai has been cautiously coming back to life amid an ongoing insurgency, militant attacks have cropped up in South Sinai. On November 23, an officer and a policeman were killed, and a conscript was injured, in an attack carried out by militants in an offroad vehicle without license plates on a traffic police vehicle as it traveled on the Abu Rudeis-Al-Tor section of the New International Road, according to local news websites. While no official statements have been made about the attack and no group took responsibility for it, security at checkpoints on roads in the area has been tightened with residents being arrested as suspects.