Controversial film does not say Israel killed POWs

JERUSALEM, Mar 9 (Reuters) An Israeli film that sparked a diplomatic row with Egypt suggests an Israeli army pursuit of retreating Egyptians in the 1967 war was unnecessary but does not say Israeli troops may have killed prisoners.

Reuters obtained a copy of the documentary yesterday after Egypt called on Israel to investigate whether troops led by Israel's current infrastructure minister may have killed 250 Egyptian prisoners of war taken in fighting in the Sinai desert.

Israeli media reports had said the film made that allegation. The film's director, Ran Edelist, said in a telephone interview with Reuters this week the documentary contained no such charges.

''There was a bit of revenge in the business. We had a lot of anger and fury towards the end of the war,'' Yariv Gershoni, a veteran of the Shaked commando unit that took part in the pursuit, said in the film.

''They (the Egyptian troops) were in a poor state, scared -- some of them hid in holes in the sand ... so we wouldn't find them. But we would find them. Only some of them put up a fight,'' Gershoni said, without mentioning prisoners or their fate.

Another former Shaked member, shown from behind as he drove a car, said Israeli forces had faced no danger from the retreating Egyptian army and in retrospect should have disobeyed orders to engage them.

''Explicitly, this needs to be talked about and said how much it was unnecessary,'' the silver-haired man, whose name was not given, said about the pursuit.

''The issue is that we carried it out. That's what's serious.

That in this operation we didn't use proper judgment, at the end of the Six-Day War,'' he said.

Gershoni said that Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, commanding the Shaked unit, ''would write on his pants in pen how many we killed'' during the final battles.

In the film Ben-Eliezer, who was later defence minister and now holds the infrastructure portfolio, said the army's thinking at the time was ''there was no problem to say 'the battalion is retreating ... (but) they are armed and we need to chase them'''.

Ben-Eliezer put off a trip to Egypt this week amid public outrage there stemming from the allegations. He said those killed were Palestinian guerrillas fighting in the Egyptian army and that they died in battle.

Israel captured the Sinai in the 1967 war and handed it back to Egypt under a 1979 peace treaty, its first with an Arab state.

REUTERS DKS PM0426