Israel killed 250 Egyptians

Egypt summons Israel envoy over alleged '67 killings

By Reuters

CAIRO - Egypt summoned Israel's envoy to Cairo yesterday after Israeli media allegations that the Israel Defense Forces may have killed 250 captured Egyptian soldiers at the end of the 1967 war. Two ruling party lawmakers demanded the ambassador's expulsion, calling him a dog and an apostate. Another called for 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 Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, now 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 documentary from the Israeli government, he said.

Israeli media quoted Ben-Eliezer 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 an Israeli foreign ministry spokeswoman, declining further comment.

"That dog of an Israeli ambassador must leave Egypt," said Mahmoud Salim, a lawmaker from 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.

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