An Israeli cabinet minister has put off a trip to Egypt, where public outrage has flared over media charges that a unit he led in the 1967 Middle East war may have killed 250 captured Egyptian soldiers, an aide said on Monday.
Infrastructure Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer has denied the allegations, saying those killed were Palestinian guerrillas fighting in the Egyptian army and that they died in battle.
The maker of an Israeli documentary film that gave rise to the controversy denied his film had asserted that captured Egyptian soldiers had been shot. "Following the false publications in the Egyptian press over the past few days ... both sides decided to postpone the visit," Ben-Eliezer's spokesman Ronen Moshe said. Ben-Eliezer had been due to go to Cairo this week to discuss importing Egyptian natural gas to Israel.
The Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth quoted Ben-Eliezer as saying he had accepted a request from Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman to postpone his visit. "I really don't understand who has interests in Egypt to turn a battle we fought against Palestinian fedayeen (guerrillas) into a political issue," it quoted Ben-Eliezer as saying.
Many Egyptians were angered by the Israeli documentary, which Egyptian and Israeli media reports said had alleged that an army unit commanded by Ben-Eliezer may have killed 250 Egyptian prisoners of war in the Sinai peninsula rather than taking them to POW camps.
Film-maker Ron Edelist told Reuters the documentary contained no testimony that the unit shot unarmed prisoners. "There was no murder of prisoners. It was a battle against Palestinian commandos. The Israeli force was bigger and the documentary is a self-examination into whether Israel used too much force, but it had nothing to do with captured soldiers," Edelist said.
"In Egypt, the opposition and Islamic extremists, who probably didn't see the documentary, are distorting it into an issue to disrupt the peace with Israel," Edelist said.
Egypt's deputy foreign minister for legal affairs, Abdel Aziz Seif al-Nasr, said on Sunday that Egypt was seeking a copy of the documentary from the Israeli government and that Israeli ambassador Shalom Cohen had been summoned for an explanation.
"From Israel's point of view, there's no reason for a crisis. Unfortunately some people have spread information that's just not true," said Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev. Israel captured Sinai in the 1967 war and handed it back to Egypt under a 1979 peace treaty, its first with an Arab state.
Reports of wartime executions in the Sinai peninsula have surfaced before. Israeli military historian Arieh Yitzhaki said more than a decade ago that his research showed Israeli troops killed 300 Egyptian prisoners of war in 1967. Israel said soldiers on both sides committed atrocities.
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