Israel minister delays Egypt trip in war crime row
JERUSALEM, Feb 5 (Reuters) An Israeli cabinet minister has postponed a trip to Egypt, where media allegations that a unit he led in the 1967 West Asia war may have killed 250 captured Egyptian soliders stirred public outrage, an aide said today.
Infrastructure Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer has denied the allegations, saying those killed were Palestinian guerrillas fighting in the Egyptian army and that they died in battle.
''Following the false publications in the Egyptian press over the past few days ... both sides decided to postpone the visit,'' Ben-Eliezer's spokesman Ronen Moshe said.
Ben-Eliezer had been due to go to Cairo this week to discuss importing Egyptian natural gas to Israel.
The Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth quoted Ben-Eliezer as saying he had accepted a request from Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman to postpone his visit.
''I really don't understand who has interests in Egypt to turn a battle we fought against Palestinian fedayeen (guerrillas) into a political issue,'' it quoted Ben-Eliezer as saying.
Many Egyptians were angered by an Israeli documentary, reported in Egyptian media as alleging an army unit commanded by Ben-Eliezer may have killed 250 Egyptian prisoners of war in the Sinai peninsula rather than taking them to POW camps.
FILM-MAKER Film-maker Ron Edelist said on Israel Army Radio that the documentary had been misinterpreted. He said it contains no testimony that the unit shot unarmed prisoners.
''In Israel the film is meant to be a self-examination regarding to the amount of force we used during the fighting. In Egypt, the opposition is taking the story and distorting it into an issue to disrupt the peace,'' Edelist said.
Egypt's deputy foreign minister for legal affairs, Abdel Aziz Seif al-Nasr, said on Sunday that Egypt was seeking a copy of the documentary from the Israeli government and that Israeli ambassador Shalom Cohen had been summoned for an explanation.
Israel captured Sinai in the 1967 war and handed it back to Egypt under a 1979 peace treaty, its first with an Arab state.
Reports of wartime executions in the Sinai peninsula have surfaced before. Israeli military 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.
REUTERS
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