Hope Aroused That Bodies of Israeli Soldiers Killed in Yom Kippur War May Be Returned

President Anwar Sadat’s official disclosure last night of the existence of a common grave where 39 Israeli soldiers killed in the Yom Kippur War were buried, has aroused hope here that the bodies may be returned. There is also, however, a general wariness that the Egyptian President may intend to use the return of the bodies as a bargaining point for further Israeli concessions.

Sadat mentioned the mass grave in a speech to the Egyptian People’s Assembly (Parliament) in which he also announced that Egypt would re-open the Suez Canal on June 5 and that it would agree to a three-month extension of the mandate of the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) in Sinai which expires next month (See separate story.)

There were still 57 Israeli soldiers listed as missing in action on the Sinai front when the Egyptians, several months ago, called off the body search that was being conducted by the Israeli army’s chaplaincy corps. Israeli requests to renew the search, conveyed through Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, brought no response from Cairo. But recently, Israeli and Egyptian officers meeting in the UN buffer zone pin-pointed the location of Israeli dead on maps of the Suez Canal zone.

Sadat’s statement indicated that Egyptian soldiers had in fact recovered the remains of the Israelis and interred them in a mass grave–a practice that Israel would not have condoned. The fact that Sadat himself had ordered a halt to the earlier body search indicated that he intended to use the remains as a bargaining point in future negotiations for a political or military accord–knowing Israel’s intense feelings over the return of its war dead. If the 39 bodies buried by the Egyptians are returned to Israel, there will still be 18 Israeli soldiers missing and unaccounted for on the Egyptian front.