If the reports suggesting that it was Israel that took out a global jihad terror cell near Rafah on Friday just as it was about to fire rockets at Eilat are true, then this is one for the history books: For the first time in 40 years, the Israel Defense Forces has launched a strike on Egyptian soil.
Past experience has shown that it is hard to know whether such an attack was coordinated with Egypt or not. In most cases, thwarting a terror attack is a decision based on immediate intelligence and executed accordingly -- you locate a terror cell and hit it before it has the chance to fire rockets at Israel. Israel is also not in the habit of sharing sensitive intelligence with strangers.
The main reason that such coordination was highly unlikely is that Egypt, despite its internal turmoil, would not have allowed such a strike to take place, not only because Cairo's national honor would be on the line, but because someone, somewhere, could have leaked it, effectively dooming the entire Egyptian leadership.
This is also the reason why Cairo could not admit that an Israeli strike -- if indeed there was one -- had taken place. If it did, the Egyptian media and public would have asked how such a strike was allowed without retaliating against what would have been perceived as a blatant violation of Egyptian sovereignty. That is why Cairo's official comments on the matter ranged from outright denial to claiming it was Egyptian forces who struck the terror cell -- anything but an admission that it might have been Israel.
This is probably not the same music heard behind the scenes in Egypt. It is highly unlikely that anyone there is mourning the terrorists' deaths, but the interim Egyptian leadership is most likely worried about the strike's implications on the already fragile security situation in the country. The Egyptian army is supposed to begin clearing the Muslim Brotherhood's supporters from the streets on Monday, and such a strike does it a disservice.
Israel has also remained mum on the matter, employing the same ambiguity that has shrouded other military operations that have taken place on Arab soil over the past few weeks and have been attributed to the IDF, from the airstrikes in Syria to the incident on the Israel-Lebanon border last week.
This policy has proved effective over the past few weeks, but it seemed to have peaked over the weekend: Egypt is not Syria and a peace treaty is not an armistice. Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon was right to praise Egypt's operations in Sinai, and Israel would do well to ensure -- clandestinely -- that the joint strategic interests are maintained, despite the threats, as they have been for the past four decades.
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