Egyptian security forces detained two Palestinian Authority Arab militants on Sunday, after they entered the Sinai Peninsula through smuggling tunnels, the Bethlehem-based Ma’an news agency reported.

Egyptian security officials told the news agency that forces seized the 34-year-old and 37-year-old as they approached a police checkpoint in the northern Sinai by taxi.

It was not immediately clear with which terror group the two are affiliated, the report said.

The security situation in the Sinai has been extremely delicate since the ouster of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak last year. Terror groups have taken advantage of the situation to carry out terror attacks against Israelis and fire rockets at the city of Eilat.

According to the Ma’an report, last Wednesday security forces seized a truck in the Sinai city of El-Arish, which was carrying fuel to be smuggled into Gaza.

The report added that in early April, Egyptian security seized three members of the Popular Resistance Committees terror group in the Sinai. The three were allegedly on route to Libya.

Last week, the Egyptian army prevented a local radical group from defacing an IDF memorial in the Sinai Peninsula.

The group, which calls itself ‘The Sinai Revolutionaries’, had threatened to deface the memorial and paint it with the colors of the Egyptian flag. The memorial was set up about 40 years ago in memory of ten IDF soldiers killed in a helicopter crash on northwestern Sinai, near the site of the former Yamit settlements, which Israel abandoned in 1979 after withdrawing from Sinai.

According to the Camp David Accords, Egypt is committed to preserving and protecting the memorial.