Cairo - One day after an evacuation order, Egyptian army bulldozers began demolishing houses along the border with the Gaza Strip 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 Tuesday and were part of a sweeping security response by the government of President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi 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. El-Sissi, 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.

The plan to create a security zone around Gaza is not new. But the demolitions Wednesday, amid the hurried evacuation of hundreds of families, seemed to signal a new determination to expand the scope of the security operations.

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 Wednesday, said that while residents had met with officials in recent weeks to discuss compensation, the evacuation order Tuesday - delivered over megaphones - took people by surprise.

On Wednesday, families could be 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."