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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