Judging by a report from Reuters published by Haaretz, relations between Egypt and Israel are set to become increasingly frosty over the coming days. Add to this the warnings from the Israeli authorities to their countrymen who are currently in Jordan and Egypt, and you can't help but come to the conclusion that something nasty is definitely on cards, and our old friends are right there in the thick of it, as usual.

Egypt summoned Israel's envoy to Cairo on Sunday after Israeli media allegations that the Israel Defense Forces may have killed 250 captured Egyptian soldiers at the end of the 1967 Six-Day War.

Two ruling party lawmakers demanded the ambassador's expulsion, calling him a dog and an apostate. Another called in a special parliamentary session for a declaration of war on Israel.

Egyptians were outraged by an Israeli documentary film which, according to media reports, alleged an army unit led by Benjamin Ben Eliezer, now Israel's infrastructure minister, may have killed 250 prisoners of war in the Sinai peninsula rather than transferring them to POW camps.

Egypt's deputy foreign minister for legal affairs, Abdel Aziz Seif al-Nasr, said Egypt had summoned Israeli ambassador Shalom Cohen to demand an explanation for the contents of the documentary, aired on Israel's Channel One television last week.

Egypt also asked its ambassador in Tel Aviv to obtain a copy of the film from the Israeli government, he said.

Ben-Eliezer was quoted as denying Egyptian prisoners were executed. He said Palestinian gunmen were killed during the fighting, not Egyptian soldiers.

"Our ambassador was asked to come to the foreign ministry and he did. They had a discussion," said a foreign ministry spokeswoman, declining further comment.

"That dog of an Israeli ambassador must leave Egypt," said Mahmoud Salim, a lawmaker from Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's ruling National Democratic Party.

Another ruling party lawmaker, Alaa Hassanein, said: "I demand the expulsion of that apostate Israeli ambassador and the withdrawal of the Egyptian ambassador from Israel."

A spokeswoman for Israel's broadcasting authority had no immediate comment.

Israel conquered Sinai in the 1967 Middle East war and handed it back to Egypt under a 1979 peace treaty, the first between Israel and an Arab state.

Many Egyptians still feel deep resentment and suspicion towards Israel because of its treatment of Palestinians seeking statehood in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

Salaam al-Ruqi'i, an independent Egyptian lawmaker from the Sinai peninsula, said: "The only way this can be eased is through a declaration of a state of war."

"We are still finding mass graves of Egyptian soldiers, and two months ago we extracted the remains of unarmed Egyptian soldiers and civilians from Sinai."

Reports of wartime executions in the Sinai peninsula have surfaced before. In 1995, a retired IDF officer told a newspaper of the killing of 49 Egyptian prisoners of war during the 1956 Sinai Campaign. An Israeli inquiry concluded that both Egyptian and IDF troops had killed prisoners.

IDF historian Arieh Yitzhaki said more than a decade ago that his research showed Israeli troops killed 300 Egyptian prisoners of war in 1967. Israel said soldiers on both sides committed atrocities.

Posted in

• Egypt
• Geneva Convention
• Israel
• Sinai
• war
• war crimes

Submitted by Sullivan on Thu, 2007-03-08 03:33.

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