A day after being ordered by the army to move, many in the area had already packed their belongings and begun to leave when an announcement from Cairo made the eviction official.

“If any resident resists leaving the area in a cordial manner, their property … will be forcibly seized,” read the decree signed by Prime Minister Ibrahim Mehleb.

General Abdel Fattah Harhour, the governor of increasingly lawless northern Sinai region, told journalists the departing residents would be compensated for their lost homes.

Egypt declared a state of emergency in the border area after at least 33 security personnel were killed on Oct. 24 in two attacks in the Sinai Peninsula, a remote but strategic region bordering Israel, Gaza and the Suez Canal.

It also accelerated plans to create a 500-meter deep buffer zone by clearing houses and trees and destroying tunnels it says are used to smuggle arms from Gaza to militants in Sinai.

A teacher at a border area school said the government, which approved the buffer zone plan at its cabinet meeting on Wednesday, should have given residents more notice and compensated them before asking them to leave.

The military began demolishing homes along the strip on Thursday.