For the first time since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, trains will soon be arriving at Al Arish, on the north coast of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.

The event will mark the completion of a key section of a new 500-km railway. According to a report in the Oct. 17 issue of Al Ahram, the event drew celebratory reactions on social media, with users welcoming the railway’s return and expressing pride in development efforts across Sinai.

Before the 1967 Arab–Israeli War, Egyptians and Palestinians could travel by train from Gaza City, in the then-Egyptian-administered Gaza Strip, to Cairo. That ended in the 1967 war, which saw the Gaza Strip and all of the Sinai Peninsula occupied by Israel. While the 1979 Israel-Egypt peace treaty returned the Sinai to Egypt, it was de-militarized under the peace agreement, and the Sinai turned into one of the poorest regions in Egypt—a no man’s land of drug smugglers, bandits, and terrorists. This all changed in 2024, when the government of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El Sisi, with the agreement of the United States and Israel, launched security operations to clear the entire peninsula of criminal and terrorist elements, while launching a major development program.

The project lies alongside the Suez Canal Economic Zone, created after the enlargement of the Canal to accommodate the largest of container ships. The center of this strategy is the development of a 500-kilometer railway project linking Fardan, East Port Said at the entrance of the Suez Canal to Bir Al-Abd, Arish on the north-eastern coast of Sinai, where it turns south to the port of Taba on the Gulf of Aqaba, creating an integrated logistics corridor, a multi-modal network of ports, railways, highways, and logistics zones designed to connect production centers in Sinai with domestic markets and export routes to Europe, Asia, and the Gulf of Aqaba. Completing the rail link to Al Arish is the half-way point to Taba.