Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi on Wednesday renewed an ongoing state of emergency in certain parts of the northern Sinai Peninsula for an additional three months.

Al-Sisi’s decree also included the imposition of a nighttime curfew in certain parts of the restive peninsula.

In October of last year, following a militant attack that killed dozens of soldiers, the Egyptian authorities imposed a state of emergency -- for the first time ever -- in several parts of Sinai.
Since then, the state of emergency has been renewed a total of four times.

Since mid-2013, when Mohamed Morsi -- Egypt’s first democratically elected president and a Muslim Brotherhood leader -- was ousted in a military coup, northern Sinai has become the epicenter of a deadly insurgency that has largely targeted Egyptian security personnel.

Egyptian security forces, meanwhile, have been waging a fierce campaign against militants in the volatile peninsula, which shares borders with both Israel and the blockaded Gaza Strip.

The Egyptian military has also created a buffer zone along Sinai’s border with the Gaza Strip -- which since 2007 has been governed by Palestinian resistance movement Hamas -- to prevent alleged arms smuggling from the coastal enclave.

PHOTO CAPTION

An Egyptian army tank is seen stationed outside a school taken over by soldiers in the Sinai Peninsula between the northern Sinai cities of Al-Arish and Sheikh Zuwayed, May 25, 2015

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