There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack on the mosque — which is often frequented by Sufi Muslims — where an apparent suicide bombing ripped across the facade and people were shot as they tried to scramble to safety.
Egyptian security forces have struggled for years against an Islamic State affiliate based in the Sinai Peninsula that has killed hundreds of police and military personnel in an insurgency against the government of President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi.
The mosque death toll, reported by state media, could not be independently confirmed. Yet Egyptians were already mourning it as the biggest loss of life from a militant attack in decades — surpassing the number of dead in the downing of a Russian airliner over Sinai in 2015. That attack is believed to have been carried out by Islamic State-linked militants.
Islamist attacks have targeted Coptic Christian churches in the past, but strikes against mosques have been rare. Many Sunni Muslim militant factions consider Sufism, a mystical branch of Islam, to be heretical.
The bloodshed at the Rawda mosque, near the town of Bir al-Abd, took place in an area dotted with security outposts, underscoring the ability of militants to strike at the heart of government-protected zones.
The attack also had the hallmarks of a highly coordinated operation. Militants arrived at the mosque in several four-wheel-drive vehicles, according to Egypt’s ambulance authority. Bombs were detonated at the mosque, and as worshipers fled, they were gunned down by the militants, the authority said.
But further details remained unclear, including the number of assailants and why the mosque was targeted.
Dozens of bodies, covered with blankets or bloodied sheets, lay in rows inside the mosque after the attack. Some of the injured were ferried away in cars and in the beds of pickup trucks.
In a televised speech, the Egyptian president Sissi offered condolences to the victims and vowed that Egypt’s armed forces would respond with “brute force.”
“We cannot be intimidated,” he said. “Our will cannot be broken.”
“When the people ran outside, a number of gunmen started shooting randomly at everyone,” he said. Some survived by running back inside the mosque, he added.
The mosque would have been packed. It was frequented by the town’s residents, and on Fridays, travelers on the road often stopped to pray there, Eldewiry said.
“Horrible and cowardly terrorist attack on innocent and defenseless worshipers in Egypt,” wrote President Trump in a tweet. “The world cannot tolerate terrorism, we must defeat them militarily and discredit the extremist ideology that forms the basis of their existence!”
Egypt’s insurgency gathered momentum after a military coup in 2013 that ousted Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president and a leader of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood.
The militants have repeatedly mounted large-scale, complex attacks on security personnel. Since July 2013, at least 1,000 members of the security forces have been killed in attacks in Sinai, according to data compiled by the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy.
Assaults on civilians — like Friday’s mosque siege — have been more rare. The Islamic State affiliate in Egypt, called Wilayat Sinai, had previously claimed responsibility for the downing of a Russian airliner over Sinai in October 2015 that killed all 224 people on board. The militants have also increasingly targeted Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority, as well as Sufi Muslims, considered heretics by the Islamic State.
Sinai remains one of the lingering strongholds for the Islamic State as the group’s self-proclaimed caliphate in Syrian and Iraq has all but collapsed under air and ground attacks.