CAIRO: Egypt mourned on Saturday as the death toll from a gun and bomb assault at a mosque in the Sinai Peninsula soared above 300, including children, in the deadliest attack the country has witnessed.
The army said warplanes had struck militant hideouts in the insurgency-wracked North Sinai in retaliation.
Funerals for the victims were held overnight and many were buried unwashed in their bloodied clothes, according to the Islamic burial practices for martyrs, security and medical officials said.
President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi declared three days of mourning and vowed to “respond with brutal force” to the attack, among the deadliest in the world since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the US.
“The army and police will avenge our martyrs and return security and stability with force in the coming short period,” he said in a televised speech.
Hours later Egyptian air force jets pursued the “terrorists and discovered several vehicles used in the terrorist attack, killing those inside near the vicinity of the attack,” an army spokesman said in a statement.
Locals and relatives of people living in the village where the attack happened said the mosque was the most prominent in the area.
“This is the largest mosque in the area. It is the parent mosque, where events take place, funerals and weddings. When full it has 600 or 700 people,” said Ahmed Sweilam, whose cousins live in the village.
“Darkness pervades the village now.”
World leaders voiced outrage. US President Donald Trump denounced on Twitter the “horrible and cowardly terrorist attack on innocent and defenseless worshippers.”
Sheikh Ahmed El-Tayeb, the grand imam of Cairo’s Al-Azhar, Egypt’s highest institution of Sunni Islam, condemned “in the strongest terms this barbaric terrorist attack.”
A tribal leader and head of a Bedouin militia that fights Daesh told AFP that the mosque is known as a place where Sufis gather.
Daesh views Sufis as heretics. The group has also killed more than 100 Christians in church bombings and shootings in Sinai and other parts of Egypt, forcing many to flee the peninsula.
The military has struggled to quell the terrorists who pledged allegiance to Daesh in November 2014.
The militants have since increasingly turned to civilian targets, attacking not only Christians and Sufis but also Bedouin Sinai inhabitants accused of working with the army.
The group also claimed the bombing of a Russian plane that killed all 224 people on board after takeoff from the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm El-Sheikh on Oct. 31, 2015.
Aside from Daesh, Egypt also faces a threat from Al-Qaeda-aligned terrorists who operate out of neighboring Libya.
A group calling itself Ansar Al-Islam — Supporters of Islam in Arabic — claimed an October ambush in Egypt’s Western Desert that killed at least 16 policemen.
The military later conducted airstrikes on the attackers, killing their leader.
Prosecutor says gunmen in Sinai mosque attack carried Daesh flag; death toll raised to 305
Prosecutor says gunmen in Sinai mosque attack carried Daesh flag; death toll raised to 305
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Battered by Gaza war, Israel’s tech sector in recovery mode
- “High-tech companies had to overcome massive staffing cuts, because 15 to 20 percent of employees, and sometimes more, were called up” to the front as reservists, IIA director Dror Bin told
JERUSALEM: Israel’s vital tech sector, dragged down by the war in Gaza, is showing early signs of recovery, buoyed by a surge in defense innovation and fresh investment momentum.
Cutting-edge technologies represent 17 percent of the country’s GDP, 11.5 percent of jobs and 57 percent of exports, according to the latest available data from the Israel Innovation Authority (IIA), published in September 2025.
But like the rest of the economy, the sector was not spared the knock-on effects of the war, which began in October 2023 and led to staffing shortages and skittishness from would-be backers.
Now, with a ceasefire largely holding in Gaza since October, Israel’s appeal is gradually returning, as illustrated in mid-December, when US chip giant Nvidia announced it would create a massive research and development center in the north that could host up to 10,000 employees.
“Investors are coming to Israel nonstop,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at the time.
After the war, the recovery can’t come soon enough.
“High-tech companies had to overcome massive staffing cuts, because 15 to 20 percent of employees, and sometimes more, were called up” to the front as reservists, IIA director Dror Bin told AFP.
To make matters worse, in late 2023 and 2024, “air traffic, a crucial element of this globalized sector, was suspended, and foreign investors froze everything while waiting to see what would happen,” he added.
The war also sparked a brain drain in Israel.
Between October 2023 and July 2024, about 8,300 employees in advanced technologies left the country for a year or more, according to an IIA report published in April 2025.
The figure represents around 2.1 percent of the sector’s workforce.
The report did not specify how many employees left Israel to work for foreign companies versus Israeli firms based abroad, or how many have since returned to Israel.
- Rise in defense startups -
In 2023, the tech sector far outpaced GDP growth, increasing by 13.7 percent compared to 1.8 percent for GDP.
But the sector’s output stagnated in 2024 and 2025, according to IIA figures.
Industry professionals now believe the industry is turning a corner.
Israeli high-tech companies raised $15.6 billion in private funding in 2025, up from $12.2 billion in 2024, according to preliminary figures published in December by Startup Nation Central (SNC), a non-profit organization that promotes Israeli innovation.
Deep tech — innovation based on major scientific or engineering advances such as artificial intelligence, biotech and quantum computing — returned in 2025 to its pre-2021 levels, according to the IIA.
The year 2021 is considered a historic peak for Israeli tech.
The past two years have also seen a surge in Israeli defense technologies, with the military engaged on several fronts from Lebanon and Syria to Iran, Yemen, Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
Between July 2024 and April 2025, the number of startups in the defense sector nearly doubled, from 160 to 312, according to SNC.
Of the more than 300 emerging companies collaborating with the research and development department of Israel’s defense ministry, “over 130 joined our operations during the war,” Director General Amir Baram said in December.
Until then, the ministry had primarily sourced from Israel’s large defense firms, said Menahem Landau, head of Caveret Ventures, a defense tech investment company.
But he said the war pushed the ministry “to accept products that were not necessarily fully finished and tested, coming from startups.”
“Defense-related technologies have replaced cybersecurity as the most in-demand high-tech sector,” the reserve lieutenant colonel explained.
“Not only in Israel but worldwide, due to the war between Russia and Ukraine and tensions with China.”
