Egypt asked Israel to investigate allegations that its troops massacred
Arab prisoners during the 1967 war. Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed
Aboul Gheit said Tuesday that he had submitted the request to his Israeli
counterpart, Tzipi Livni, during a meeting in Brussels.”The Egyptian people
and Egyptian society is extremely angry, and we hope that the issue will be tackled in a manner to understand and feel that Egyptian anger,” Gheit told
reporters.Israeli-Egyptian ties have been strained by a documentary,
recently aired in Israel, which featured allegations that Israeli commandos
killed 250 Egyptian troops captured during the Six-Day War. According to the documentary, the soldiers in question were under the command of Benjamin
Ben-Eliezer, now Israel’s infrastructure minister. Ben-Eliezer has denied wrongdoing,
saying there was never any such massacre and that the Egyptians were killed in battle.Others have noted that the Egyptians also have been accused of atrocities against Israelis during the war.”Right now the relations between
Israel and Egypt are based on peace and understanding, and I think that even
though there are scars – families whose loved ones were killed during
the wars – this is something we should leave behind us,” Livni said.
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