CAIRO, 7 March 2007 — An influential parliamentary panel in Egypt yesterday threatened to review ties with Israel, as the Jewish state played down a report that Egyptian prisoners were executed during the 1967 Middle East War. Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni told her Egyptian counterpart Ahmed Aboul Gheit at a meeting in Brussels there was nothing to justify the claims and asked him to ease tensions in Egypt sparked by an Israeli documentary.
The Arab and foreign affairs committee of Egypt’s Parliament called for Israel to put any suspects on trial or face a review of “the entire economic relationship and accords sealed between Egypt and Israel.”
In a statement carried by the state news agency MENA, the committee called for the Foreign Ministry to lobby for international support for a war crimes trial at the International Criminal Court. “The Israelis should know that just as the Nazi crimes ... are not erased from the memory, their own crimes will not be erased from the memory of the Egyptian people or the Arab world,” it said.
“The mask has dropped and revealed the ugly face of Israel’s military institution which carries out state terrorism,” it charged. Claims that a crack Israeli unit killed Egyptian prisoners during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War have already been vehemently denied by unit commander Benjamin Ben-Eliezer — now Israel’s national infrastructure minister.
But they have raised a storm of controversy in Egypt, where the affair dominated the front pages for several days, sparked an angry debate in Parliament and led the Foreign Ministry to summon Israel’s ambassador in Cairo.
In Jerusalem, the Foreign Ministry said “Israel regrets the fact that elements in Egypt are using the film in a manipulative and erroneous way... in order to sabotage ties between the two countries.” Livni asked Aboul Gheit to make an effort to calm the tension in Egypt over the film and insisted “there is no claim that POWs were executed, but there was killing as part of the battle,” the ministry said. They also agreed that a copy of the film, first aired on Israeli public television more than a week ago, and its transcript would be handed to the Egyptian foreign minister.
Egyptian media have characterized it as showing that Israeli soldiers executed 250 Egyptian prisoners of war in the Sinai Peninsula immediately after the cessation of hostilities — rather than transferring them to prison camps. But the film’s producer, Ran Ederlist, said Monday that the Egyptian reports badly distorted his documentary.
