They boarded the vessel, which stayed afloat, to extinguish the flames. The Islamists said they used missiles, while the Egyptian army said the ship came under heavy fire from the shore.
Meanwhile, the photographs that surfaced on Twitter showed a rocket fired towards a naval vessel hitting it and setting it on fire following impact. In the pictures, the blast sends a fireball into the sky. Sinai Province claimed to have destroyed the naval frigate.
The use of a guided missile to strike an Egyptian ship represents a higher level of technological sophistication than what has been previously observed in Sinai attacks.
They have also carried out attacks west of the Suez Canal, which separates the Sinai from the rest of Egypt. Gen. Mohammed Samir said there were no fatalities among the vessel’s crew in the shootout with “terrorists”. Eight sailors remain missing from that incident.
A activist panel in Egypt associated with Islamic State supposedly has said responsibility and accountability for sacking about three rockets on Friday into southern part of the Israel.
It comes just two weeks after a major battle between Egyptian forces and IS in Sinai, and it’s clearly proving hard to remove the militants and their growing arsenal from the area. Islamic State loyalists in recent months, and al-Qaeda-linked militants have operated in eastern Libya for years.
The Sinai has always been a hotbed of political instability, particularly in the north-east near Egypt’s border with Gaza and Israel.
“The Egyptian military needs to recalibrate”, he added.
Egypt’s Daesh affiliate said it was behind Wednesday’s incident, claiming the car’s driver was a suicide bomber who had detonated his explosives’ load, killing several soldiers.
Egypt’s cabinet has amended a draft counter-terrorism law so that journalists would be fined, rather than jailed, for contradicting the authorities’ version of any terrorist attack, the state news agency says. The army killed 273 of the militants in response. On June 29, Prosecutor General Hisham Barakat was assassinated in Cairo by a auto bomb.
