Premier Shimon Peres flatly denied, at today’s Cabinet meeting, that one of his top aides met secretly with a representative of Jordan’s King Hussein in Cairo last week.
Peres was referring to a report in today’s Yediot Achronot claiming that Gen. (Res.) Avraham Tamir, Director General of the Prime Minister’s Office, met in the Egyptian capital with Adnan Abu Oudeh, Minister of State at the Royal Court in Amman, to discuss possible Palestinian members of a joint Jordanian-Palestinian negotiating team.
The report had been emphatically denied earlier by the Prime Minister’s Office. It was followed by Peres’ denial, in response to a question by Minister of Commerce and Industry Ariel Sharon. The Prime Minister’s denial was later given to the media as an official statement.
The report in Yediot Achronot was written by the newspaper’s Arab affairs correspondent, Semadar Perry, who gave no source for her story. Tamir was in Cairo last week, officially for talks with Prime Minister Kemal Hassan Ali and Foreign Minister Esmet Abdel Meguid. The Egyptian capital was also visited earlier last week by the Israeli Minister of Energy, Moshe Shahal.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
