Direct negotiations between Israel and Egypt on sovereignty over the Taba region of Sinai south of Eilat have failed, and the parties must now move on to a conciliation committee, Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir told the Israel Bar Association last Friday.
He told the Association’s weekly luncheon meeting that if conciliation failed to reach a mutually-agreed conclusion, the final step of compulsory arbitration by an agreed arbiter would have to be taken. “Negotiations were the first state in the process to determine the final demarcation line. The conciliation committee is next, and if this fails, the matter will be referred to agreed arbitration,” he said.
Israel claims that the pre-1967 border was incorrectly marked on the ground and the line should have run along the southern edge of a pencilled line drawn on a map.
The line was marked in the early years of the century, between Britain and the Turkish Empire, with a blunt pencil on a small-scale map. When translated on to the ground, the broad line (probably about one mm. wide) became a stretch of some 700 metres.
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