Egypt fields roughly 40,000 troops across the Sinai Peninsula, nearly double the 22,000 limit established by the security annex of the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. Zone C, the strip bordering Gaza and Israel, holds the bulk, backed by armored vehicles, Chinese air defenses, and upgraded runways at al Gora. Cairo calls the surge a “counterterrorism necessity”; that justification no longer holds. Instead, the permanent buildup quietly erodes the demilitarized buffer that has kept the Egyptian-Israeli border peaceful for nearly five decades.

Washington must condition any military assistance and diplomatic cover for Egypt on two linked steps: Cairo’s accession to the Abraham Accords and a verifiable reduction of Sinai’s heavy forces to levels closer to the treaty’s original ceilings. The “cold peace” has preserved quiet borders and delivered a $35 billion natural gas export deal between Israel and Egypt. Yet it has not brought the economic integration, intelligence fusion, or political normalization that the Abraham Accords have delivered to the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco.