Police barracks in Rafah, the town in North Sinai that borders the Gaza strip, came under attack early Monday when a group of unknown perpetrators fired rocket-propelled grenades at the building, Egyptian media reported.

According to Agence France-Presse, at  least one Egyptian police officer was injured. Meanwhile, a reporter in North Sinai for Egyptian state-run TV named the victim as Muhammad Ahmad Mahmud, 21, but didn't mention his profession. 

The attackers were deterred by tribesmen in the area who identified them as members of "extremist religious groups and foreign elements from the other side of the border," added the reporter, speaking on Egypt's Channel 1.

Sinai Bedouins' testy relations with Egyptian authorities have been heightened by days of nationwide political unrest. 

An Egyptian pipeline providing natural gas to Jordan was attacked Saturday near the North Sinai town of El Arish, disrupting gas flow and perhaps sending a stern warning to Israel and the region about the volatility of the political upheavals in Egypt.

Contradictory reports said the pipeline also provided gas to Syria and Israel.

An unnamed official told Agence France-Presse that the explosion had forced authorities to turn off the gas supply from a twin pipeline to Israel, located near the Gaza strip. Other news reports said the explosion had  targeted a pipeline that transports gas from the Egyptian city of Port Said to Israel, Syria, and Jordan.  

Revolutions seem to take place all of a sudden, but usually they don't really come out of the blue. Whether religious, political or economic reasons are behind upheaval, it often reflects a long process that reached a tipping point and a window of opportunity. 

The time must be right but the ground must be ripe, too. In this context, an Israeli research group suggests Tunisia's was a textbook revolution. Not in the sense that it was a perfect storm or that it followed a certain formula -- no two revolutions are the same -- but in the sense that it may actually have begun in school textbooks.

The Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-SE) is a group that conducts in-depth studies of school curriculum throughout the Middle East, checking hundreds of books per country and they way they teach about tolerance and peace.

A comprehensive study of the Tunisian curriculum, completed in 2009 and presented before the European parliament, found that education in Tunisia cultivates equality and is much more progressive in teaching tolerance than any other Arab country.

But it wasn't always so, says Yohanan Manor, a retired Jewish Agency official and political scientist who established the research group a decade ago. According to Manor, Tunisia began instituting educational reform in the mid-1990s, when Zine el Abidine ben Ali (who was overthrown last month) appointed a political opponent as minister of education. Mohamed Charfi, who died a few years ago, was a lawyer and longtime human rights leader in Tunisia and a fierce critic of Ben Ali, in particular concerning human rights issues.

The now-deposed president had placed Charfi in charge of the education ministry, maybe so that  he could keep an eye on him but also because Ben Ali  was interested in letting the rights leader implement his agenda, which was separating religion and state, Manor said, noting that the issue is a longstanding one in Tunisian history.

For the mainstream Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and its archrival the Islamist Hamas, which has ruled the Gaza Strip since June 2007, the turmoil in Egypt is a source of concern.

In the West Bank, the pro-West Palestinian Authority refused to give permission for Palestinians wishing to hold protests in support of the Egyptian uprising.

In Gaza, Hamas authorities broke up with force a sit-in by few people attempting to show solidarity with Egyptians calling for President Hosni Mubarak to step down. The journalists who attempted to cover the sit-in were also beaten by armed Hamas forces.

Both regimes see in Mubarak and Egypt in general an important ally.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas relies heavily on support from Mubarak in his efforts to get a negotiated peace settlement with Israel. Mubarak’s good relations with Israel and the West, mainly the U.S., help Abbas withstand pressure to give in on important negotiating issues.

The Gaza Strip has borders only with Israel and Egypt. As Israel does not allow Hamas leaders and most of the 1.5 million residents of the coastal enclave to leave the strip through its borders or even to use Gaza airspace or the sea, Egypt remains their only way to reach the outside world.

So far, both Palestinian Authority and Hamas leaders have not made any public comment on the situation in Egypt. Recalling how former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat appeared to side with Saddam Hussein in his invasion of Kuwait, thus losing support and sympathy from the Persian Gulf countries, the current leaders have preferred not to get involved.

Neither party can afford to lose Egyptian support and sympathy if they make the wrong statement or take the wrong position, particularly since it is not yet clear where the popular uprising going to lead.

Ghassan Shaka’a, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Executive Committee, which is headed by Abbas, expressed in a cautiously written statement the Palestinian Authority’s “deep concern for the developments” in Egypt. He was more interested in the safety and preservation of Egypt’s historical heritage than the demands of millions of Egyptians for the removal of Mubarak from office.

The Palestinian public, on the other hand, had a totally different perspective on the situation.

Mahdi Abdul Hadi, president of the Jerusalem-based Palestinian think-tank PASSIA (the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs), said he was proud of the “true, passionate and national young Egyptians.”

He said that “the current people’s intifada [uprising] from Tunisia to Cairo is the second Arab awakening in the making.”

Hazem Qawasmi, a Palestinian activist, criticized the ban on demonstrations in the Palestinian territories, wondering “how long are the repression of freedoms and preventing the Palestinian people from exercising their right for peaceful assembly and freedom of expression going to continue?”

The General Union of Palestinian Writers saluted the Egyptian people, declaring support for their “legitimate demands.”

Though Fatah and Hamas have agreed on suppressing any public expression of support for the removal of Mubarak from office, both took this opportunity to call on their supporters to rise against the other’s rule.

Learning from the effect of the social networks in mobilizing the masses behind a national cause, Fatah, which lost the Gaza Strip to Hamas in a humiliating short battle, opened a Facebook account and used it to call for a popular upheaval in the Gaza Strip against Hamas rule. It declared Feb. 11 as the date for this proposed uprising.

“Come from everywhere, from every home and corner in our occupied homeland. Join the people and declare it an ongoing intifada” against the Hamas rule, said the Facebook site, which claimed that more than 2,800 people have immediately joined it.

Hamas also believes that an uprising against the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank is only a matter of time.

-- Maher Abukhater in Ramallah, West Bank

Responding to a request from Egypt, Israel has approved the deployment of Egyptian troops in Sinai amid civil unrest in Egypt.

According to news reports, two battalions -- about 800 soldiers -- are headed for the resort of Sharm el Sheik. This is a first since the 1979 peace treaty between the two countries, which limits the security presence in Sinai to police forces.

Overseeing the security provisions of the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt is the Multinational Force and Observers, which issued a statement Monday saying it "continues to conduct its mission of peace in the current extraordinary circumstances in Egypt" but said nothing about the reported military deployment.

Reuven Rivlin, speaker of Israel's parliament, or Knesset, has urgently asked the Knesset's legal advisor whether allowing the Egyptian army into Sinai requires a vote in parliament.

Hebrew media reported Monday that Rivlin thinks the legislature may have to approve any break from the treaty, which defines the peninsula as a demilitarized zone. This was the case in 2005, when Israel handed over the so-called Philadelphi corridor between Gaza and Egypt to about 750 Egyptian border guards after Israel's disengagement from the Gaza Strip. Then too it had been Rivlin's initiative, supported by the parliament's legal advisor.

-- Batsheva Sobelman in Jerusalem

Unrest in Egypt is interrupting the smuggling of gasoline to the Gaza Strip, spurring a wave of panic buying by drivers fearful that the supply could dry up completely, news agencies reported Saturday.

Officials of the Hamas government in the coastal enclave bordering Egypt tried to dispel fears of a lasting gas shortage, but the assurances did little to halt an onslaught on gas stations.

Palestinians inhabiting the Gaza Strip get most of their fuel from an underground network of pipes and tunnels linking the territory with fuel depots in Egypt's Sinai peninsula.

Anti-government protests demanding an end to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's 30 years in power have all but shut down smuggling activity over the last few days.

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-- Carol J. Williams

Al Jazeera's latest leak of hundreds of secret Palestinian negotiating papers is providing the kind of fly-on-the-wall insights to Mideast peace talks that usually only emerge many years later in the autobiographies of politicians and diplomats.

Though some of the initial coverage and spin by Al Jazeera and other organizations has been inaccurate or out of context, the documents themselves offer a treasure trove of detailed information about Palestinians' internal strategy and tactics. Most of the documents were produced by the Palestinian Authority's own attorneys, advisors and negotiators and include transcripts of private strategy sessions and internal talking points. It's a bonanza for Israel, which can get a peek into the Palestinian thought process as recently as last year.

One December 2009 document discusses "Palestinian Messaging and Implementation." Another lays out the legal risks of a premature declaration of statehood. An internal summary of where peace talks last broke down reveals that Palestinians were prepared in 2008 to limit the number of returning refugees to 15,000 a year for 10 years, or 150,000.

If there’s a lesson from Sunday's leak of alleged meeting minutes from 2008 Mideast peace talks involving Palestinian, Israeli and U.S. officials and from the previous WikiLeaks dump of U.S. diplomatic cables, perhaps it's this: Governments needn't be so afraid of having their private business aired in public.

After the initial U.S. embarrassment from the WikiLeaks disclosures, many came to believe that the cables actually showed U.S. diplomats to be rather astute and well-informed. In the same way, Palestinians so far don't really seem to have anything to be ashamed of in the leaks from the 2008 talks. Despite the spin by Al-Jazeera and critics of the Palestinian Authority, the documents released don't show Palestinian negotiators giving away the store.

To the contrary, they're depicted as taking a surprisingly hard-line stance against giving up massive West Bank settlements such as Maale Adumim, Givat Zeev, Har Homa and Ariel, which most experts have long presumed would be retained by Israel with little fuss or cost.

Good news for a tense region, if you believe in psychic predictions, that is.

Michel Hayek, the Arab world's most celebrated clairvoyant, foresees a Middle Eastern "war for peace" in 2011, assuring the audience that tuned in for his annual televised New Year's Eve predictions that calm will prevail despite threats of war.

"The region is moving slowly toward peace, despite indications of threats and war," the Lebanese soothsayer predicted (Arabic link). "Lebanon, specifically, will be negotiating" on its own behalf, he said, "rather than being negotiated over."

Although Hayek did not speak at length about the United States or U.S. policy in the region as he has in the past, he did predict that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would suffer an on-camera breakdown.

One of his more tragic predictions already seems to have come true.

On Jan. 1, just hours after Hayek predicted a "darkness" would fall over some leaders of the Coptic church in Egypt, at least 21 Coptic worshippers were killed and dozens more injured in a bomb attack on a church in the Egyptian coastal city of Alexandria.

Former Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, once a confidant and close ally of Palestinian President and Fatah chairman Mahmoud Abbas, recently found himself in deep trouble when he apparently had decided to test Abbas’ muscle. In the end, he found himself ostracized and then kicked out of a movement in which it was believed he was the strongest man, after its founder, the late Yasser Arafat.

The Fatah Central Committee on Tuesday suspended Dahlan’s membership in the highest ruling body of the mainstream movement and stripped him of his duties as its spokesman pending the findings of an internal investigating commission.

Dahlan, who has kept away from Abbas and the West Bank after his dismissal from the movement, decided Wednesday to return to the West Bank city of Ramallah from his new home in Cairo to face the  inquiry into allegations that he went too far in bad-mouthing Abbas and of even plotting to overthrow him.

“I will appear in front of the commission and answer all its questions in spite of my reservations from the nature and course of this made-up crisis,” Dahlan, 49, said in statements from Cairo.

The Gaza-Israel border has been heating up in recent weeks, with an increasing number of incidents on the fence, and rocket and mortar fire from the strip into Israel sharply on the rise.

Alongside calculated retaliation including airstrikes on tunnels, militants and -- for the first time since the military operation known as Cast Lead nearly two years ago -- hitting Hamas targets, Israel is keeping a close eye on things and assessing the rationale for the recent escalation.

Most rocket fire is carried out not by Hamas but by smaller, more radical organizations in Gaza, Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai said this week, estimating that the smaller, more radical organizations opposing Hamas are trying to drag it into renewed conflict with Israel.

A Palestinian public opinion poll published Monday in the West Bank city of Ramallah found out that only a quarter of the Palestinians in the West Bank believe they can criticize the Palestinian Authority. In the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, the record was even worse as less than a fifth of the Palestinians there believed it is possible to criticize Hamas rule of the coastal enclave.

The poll, conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR), said the percentage of Palestinians who believe it is possible to criticize their authority has dropped over the years, from more than half in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in September 2007 to the current figures.

What apparently has prompted this gradual, yet sharp decline is the general feeling of the Palestinian public, whether in the West Bank, ruled by the liberal and Western-backed Palestinian Authority, or in the Gaza Strip, ruled by the fundamentalist and traditional Hamas, of becoming increasingly ruled by a police state.