Cabinet Ministers Point Fingers over Airport Chaos Responsibility

The Inner Cabinet met Wednesday for a short discussion of the terrorist attack on an Israeli tour bus in Egypt, but the discussion soon turned into countercharges over who was responsible for the chaos that reigned at Ben-Gurion Airport when the dead and wounded arrived there.

Relatives of the victims, who were summoned to the airport on Monday to find out which hospitals their kin were taken to, complained bitterly of callous treatment by the police and misinformation from the authorities.

All occurred before television news cameras, to the embarrassment of the various ministries.

The Foreign Ministry came in for the most scathing criticism. Its deputy director general, David Sultan, reported to the senior ministers that the ministry’s situation room coordinated information coming from Egypt to pass on to relatives and friends.

But he admitted it was not fully informed.

Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin called the Foreign Ministry’s report “a scandal,” and said its handling of the situation was “inexcusable.”

Rabin said that if a similar situation were to arise in the future, the Israel Defense Force would take full and exclusive control.

The Likud-controlled Foreign Ministry also was battered by two party hard-liners, Ariel Sharon and Yitzhak Moda’i, who are challenging Yitzhak Shamir’s leadership of Likud.

Sharon, blaming the Foreign Ministry, said the families should not have been invited to the airport, “and certainly not the media who made it into a media event.”

Rabin agreed. He said the Hercules transport plane that brought back the casualties should have been directed to land at a secluded military section of the airport, far from the eyes of press and public.

At the Inner Cabinet meeting, there we demands by Sharon and Moda’i to send a sham protest to the Egyptian government and inside that Egypt expel all persons connected with the Palestine Liberation Organization and other terrorist groups.

Israel’s ambassador to Cairo, Shimon Sham who was summoned home for the Cabinet meeting said his contacts with the Egyptian authorize had been “sympathetic, correct and helpful.”