CAIRO - Egyptian security said Wednesday that Gaza militants may be behind rockets that hit Israel and Jordan on Monday, Egypt's official Middle East News Agency (MENA) reported. "The preliminary information that the security has received indicates that Palestinian factions from the Gaza Strip are behind that operation," the state news agency quoted an unnamed security source as saying. Rockets from Egypt's Sinai, where Islamist militants have operated in the past, hit Israel's and Jordan's Red Sea ports on Monday, killing a Jordanian civilian and injuring three others, Jordanian and Israeli police said. "Egypt will not accept the use of its land by any party to harm Egyptian interests," the Egyptian security source said, adding that authorities were scaling up their investigation. Egypt earlier denied the rockets came from Sinai. No group has claimed responsibility for the attack. MENA quoted Egyptian security sources on Monday as saying rockets could not have been fired from Sinai since the largely empty, desert region was very mountainous. In 2005, rockets were fired at US warships in Aqaba but missed their target and killed a Jordanian soldier on land. A group claiming links to al Qaeda said it was behind the attack. Two years later, a Palestinian suicide bomber infiltrated through Sinai and killed three people at a bakery in Eilat, a tourist resort on Israel's southern tip which has only rarely been touched by the Middle East conflict. Jordan and Egypt are the only Arab states to have full peace treaties with Israel. Those relations were frayed by Israel's crackdown a decade ago on a Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The Islamic Hamas movement, meanwhile, denied any involvement in the rocket attack against the Israeli city of Eilat. "We have no relation with the attack," Hamas official Salah el-Bardawil said. He added that Israel's accusations that the attack was carried out by Hamas were "meaningless" and meant to mobilise the international community against the Islamic movement. Israeli security sources said the rockets were fired on Monday morning from either Egypt's Sinai or southern Jordan. Hamas, which seized Gaza violently in 2007, maintains an undeclared shaky ceasefire with Israel since the end of an Israeli major offensive in January 2009.
