Defense Minister Moshe Dayan told the Israel Cabinet yesterday that the policy of “mutuality” or reciprocity on shipping rights to which Israel and Egypt had agreed on navigation of the Suez Canal, held with equal force for shipping in the Bay and Gulf of Suez.
Gen. Dayan’s declaration came in a report he made to the Cabinet on last week’s fighting in the approaches to the canal for which Lt. Gen. Odd Bull, the cease-fire observance chief, blamed Egypt.
Under the Israeli-Egyptian canal agreement, neither side is to use the canal. As for the approaches, Gen. Dayan said, the same rule must hold-if one side can use them, the other can or else neither can.
(In Moscow today, Pravda, the Communist Party organ, challenged Prime Minister Eshkol’s declaration that the canal was a “natural” frontier and asserted that the canal was the “inalienable” property of Egypt and “will never be anybody’s border.”)
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