Tantawi ordered to retire

Islamist President Mohamed Mursi ordered Egypt's two top generals to retire, including Hussein Tantawi who led the nation after Hosni Mubarak was ousted, and appointed two generals in their place, the presidential spokesman announced on Sunday.

President Mohamed Mursi also cancelled a constitutional declaration aiming to limit presidential powers which the ruling army council issued in June as the election that brought Mursi to power drew to a close.

Defence Minister Tantawi, who served Mubarak as a minister for 20 years, and Chief of Staff Sami Enan were both appointed as advisers to Mursi. Spokesman Yasser Ali said the changes among Egypt's top brass were effective immediately.

Six die in Sinai operation

Meanwhile, Egyptian security forces killed six gunmen in a raid on a village of North Sinai on Sunday, witnesses said, as the military pressed a campaign against Islamists in the lawless peninsula neighbouring Gaza and Israel.

Security officials said they found chemicals used to make explosives, rocket-propelled grenades and machineguns with the militants in El-Jurah village. One of the gunmen was seriously wounded, they said.

The bodies of three gunmen were charred in a fire that broke out during an exchange of gunfire, in which the soldiers fired at the house with machineguns mounted on armoured personnel carriers.

The cause of the blaze was unclear but witnesses said they did not see any air strikes.

"The security forces raided a small house in the village, and there was an exchange of gunfire," said one witness, who requested anonymity.

"They killed six people and left the bodies, and came back with ambulances and a fire truck to retrieve them," he said.

Another witness, who described the gunmen as "strangers" to the village, said the six men were killed when security forces entered a home they were hiding in.

Witnesses said no troops appeared to have been killed in the raid.

Earlier, however, three soldiers died in a road accident elsewhere in the peninsula as troops fanned out to secure checkpoints and massed near the borders with the Gaza Strip and Israel.

Overnight, gunmen traded fire with security forces at a checkpoint in the town of Sheikh Zuwayid, several kilometres from El-Jurah, security officials said. No casualties were reported in the clash.

The military carried out an air strike on the village on Wednesday morning that apparently missed its target and hit the wall of a storage place for wood.

Sunday's raid came as the military sent more tanks and armoured vehicles to Sinai in an unprecedented campaign to capture or kill Islamic militants behind an attack on an army outpost that killed 16 soldiers on August 5.

It claimed to have killed 20 militants in Wednesday's air strikes, but witnesses said there were no deaths in the helicopter attacks, the first in the Sinai in decades.

Official media reported on Friday that security forces arrested six "terrorists" in the town of Sheikh Zuwayid, 15 km from the border with Gaza.

Their relatives told AFP that nine men were arrested, some of them relatives and all devout Muslims. They had nothing to do with the attack on the soldiers, and they were asleep in their homes when masked security forces burst in on them.

Hazem Yusef, a relative of several of the arrested men, said on Sunday three of them have been released, leaving six in detention.

The military campaign has seen the largest buildup of troops in the Sinai since Israel returned the territory under a 1979 peace treaty that restricted Egypt's military presence on the peninsula.

The Egyptian military believes Islamist Bedouin militants work with radical extremists in Gaza.

The Islamist movement Hamas which rules Gaza insisted on Sunday there was no proof to date of any Palestinian involvement in the attack on the Egyptian military.

"Until now, neither the Palestinian nor the Egyptian security services have  proof that any party in Gaza supported or executed the attack," said senior Hamas official Salah Al Bardawil.

"Egypt hasn't supplied the Gaza government with any accusation or given any information about the involvement of Palestinians," he told reporters. "If it is proven that a Palestinian was involved, then measures will be taken."

Within hours of the attack, sources in Cairo suggested some of the gunmen had entered Sinai through a network of smuggling tunnels which run under the Gaza border, prompting Hamas to take the unprecedented step of shutting them down.

Gaza tunnels a 'threat'

The Palestinian Authority has condemned the network of smuggling tunnels between Hamas-run Gaza and Egypt as a "threat" to security and lauded Cairo's campaign to seal them.
Tayeb Abdelrahim, chief of staff to Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, expressed full support for Egyptian moves.

"The Palestinian Authority affirms its full solidarity with Egypt and backs all the measures implemented by the Egyptian leadership and the security forces, including special measures to close the smuggling tunnels that are pathways of vandalism," he said in a statement received by AFP on Sunday.

"The tunnels have recently become a threat to Egypt's security and to Palestinian unity and they only serve a small category of stakeholders and private interests," said Abdelrahim, describing those who run them as "inconsiderate of Egypt and Palestine's higher interests."

The tunnels trade, which analysts estimate is worth half a billion dollars a year, has played a significant part in Gaza's economy since Israel first imposed a blockade in 2006 following the capture of one of its soldiers, who has since been released.
They are used for bringing in a wide variety of goods, including food, fuel and building materials in what many say is a lifeline for the Gaza population.

But Abdelrahim denied the tunnels played such a major part in Gaza's economy.

"The Palestinian Authority spends more than half of its budget on the Gaza Strip and tunnels have nothing to do with reviving the economy there," he charged.

He did not say why the tunnels were a threat "to Palestinian unity," referring to the tense relations between Gaza's Hamas rulers and the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority.

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