CAIRO — One day after an evacuation order, Egyptian Army bulldozers began demolishing houses along the border with Gaza on Wednesday, the first step in establishing what officials say will be a buffer zone intended to stop the passage of militants and weapons across the frontier.
The evacuations of hundreds of houses, mainly in the border town of Rafah, started on Tuesday and were part of a sweeping security response by the government of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to months of deadly militant attacks on Egyptian security personnel in the Sinai Peninsula, including the massacre of at least 31 soldiers last week.
That assault, on Friday, was the deadliest on the Egyptian military in years, and a blow to the government, which has claimed to be winning the battle against insurgents. Mr. Sisi, a former general, spoke of a “conspiracy” facing the state, though prosecutors have not yet named any suspects.
In the past, however, Egyptian security officials and government-friendly news outlets have repeatedly sought to implicate Palestinian militants from Gaza in such attacks, while rarely providing any evidence for those claims.
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The plan to create a security zone around Gaza is not new. But the demolitions on Wednesday, amid the hurried evacuation of hundreds of families, seemed to signal a new determination to expand the scope of the security operations.
On Monday, Mr. Sisi issued a decree that placed public facilities such as power stations, bridges and roads under the protection of the military, and stipulated that crimes against such facilities would be subject to prosecution in military courts. A presidential spokesman said that the decree, which will be in force for two years, was needed to protect public utilities from terrorist attacks.
Human rights workers, though, saw the law as evidence that the government was seizing on security threats to expand an already suffocating crackdown on dissent. In recent weeks, the authorities have moved forcefully to stamp out protests on university campuses, and on Sunday a Cairo court sentenced 23 people to three years in prison for organizing an unauthorized street protest in June.
“It is confirmation of a conviction we have had for months, that Egypt is solidifying the rule of the police and the military,” Gamal Eid, the head of the Cairo-based Arab Network for Human Rights, said of the decree.
The decree, which was issued while Egypt does not have a sitting parliament, also appeared to violate provisions of the Constitution, including a guarantee of fair trials for civilians, rights workers said.
Even with its greatly expanded security powers, the government has struggled to contain militant movements that have killed hundreds of police officers, soldiers and other security personnel over the last year. The insurgents, operating mainly in Sinai, have continued to show signs of growing sophistication: The attack on Friday was said to unfold in two stages, with militants attacking soldiers who responded to an initial explosion.
Afterward, the authorities declared a state of emergency in the area and closed the Gaza Strip’s border crossing with Egypt. Officials said that the buffer zone would extend the length of the border with the Gaza, and reach about 500 yards into Egyptian territory.
It remained to be seen whether the buffer zone would have any effect on militant activity, given that the Egyptian authorities had all but sealed off the Gaza Strip over the last year, by severely limiting traffic over the border and aggressively demolishing smuggling tunnels. Residents said the evacuations would likely fuel resentment in Sinai, a region that has historically been marginalized by Egyptian leaders and that has been the scene, over the last year, of an intensifying armed conflict.
Mustafa Singer, a journalist based in Sinai who was near the border on Wednesday, said that while residents had met with officials in recent weeks to discuss compensation, the evacuation order on Tuesday — delivered over megaphones — took people by surprise.
On Wednesday, families could been seen traveling in trucks loaded with furniture away from the border. “There is confusion — difficulty in finding moving trucks, limited time, no places ready as alternatives to move into,” he said.
The residents he had spoken to considered the evacuation “group punishment,” he said. “The attack could be from outside the borders, from inside, from the governorates — who knows.”