Amid tensions in Sinai, army says southern Israel rocket sirens a false alarm
Alarms sound in Kadesh Barnea and Nitzana as Egyptian military continues assault on IS Sinai targets in response to mosque massacre
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Rocket sirens that wailed Sunday in the western Negev were a false alarm, the IDF said, amid tensions along Israel’s border with the Sinai peninsula.
The sirens sounded in the communities of Kadesh Barnea and Nitzana.
The army did not say what triggered the false alarms, but previous false rocket sirens along the Israeli-Egyptian border have been triggered by internal fighting between the Egyptian Army and Islamic State-linked jihadists.
Sunday’s sirens sounded as the Egyptian military continued its aerial assault on Islamic State targets in the Sinai Peninsula in response to a gun and bomb terror attack on a mosque in the desert region that took the lives of over 300 Muslim worshipers.
According to the Egyptian state prosecution, up to 30 militants in camouflage flying the Islamic State group’s black banner surrounded the mosque and massacred the worshipers during weekly Friday prayers.
Twenty-seven children were among the dead.
IS has not claimed responsibility for the attack, but it is the main suspect as the mosque is associated with followers of the mystical Sufi branch of Sunni Islam whom it has branded heretics.
Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi declared three days of mourning and vowed to “respond with brutal force” to the terror attack, among the deadliest in the world since the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.
The Times of Israel Community.