Ahmad Abu Al Gheit, the Egyptian Foreign Minister, said on Tuesday night that Israel must investigate reports which held the Israeli Army responsible for executing 250 Egyptian soldiers who surrendered to the Israeli army during the 1967 war.
Abu Al Gheit told reporters that he sent a harsh rhetoric letter to Tzipi Livni, his Israeli counterpart, after he watched the Israeli-made documentary “The Spirit of Shaked” in which testimonies collected from former Egyptian soldiers revealed that Israeli soldiers executed 250 surrendering Egyptian soldiers in the Sinai peninsula, Israeli online daily, Haaretz, reported.
Commenting of the documentary, Abu Al Gheit stated that it raises questions about the Israeli military actions, especially since there was no reason for the Israeli soldiers to use excessive force against the special Egyptian forces, Haaretz added.
But Haaretz also said that in spite of the tension the documentary caused, and the national anger in the country, Egypt does not intend to cut ties with Israel.
The documentary was broadcast in Egypt in early March, and the tension it caused forced the Israeli Infrastructure Minister, Benjamin Ben Eliezer, to cancel a trip to Cairo.
Ben Eliezer was in command of the Shaked unit that carried out the reported killing of the 250 soldiers.
Egyptian Legislators called on their government to suspend its peace deal with Israel, recall its ambassador in Tel Aviv, and file criminal charges against Israel.
Meanwhile, Abu Al Gheit did not voice a direct accusation against Israel, but said that the country must conduct an immediate investigation and take all of the necessary measures to try the suspects for their violations of International Law.
Haaretz also said that the documentary's producer, Ran Ederlist, claimed that the Egyptian press “badly distorted his documentary” saying that the incident involved Palestinian fighters and not Egyptian soldiers.
In 1995, Egypt probed Israel about the incident and the Israeli Vice Prime Minister, Shimon Peres, assigned an army major to investigate it, but the investigation yielded no results, Haaretz said.
Moreover, several Egyptian newspapers published interviews this months with Egyptians who served in the army in 1967, including an army officer identified as Osama Al Sadeq.
Al Sadeq stated that on June 6th 1967, orders were given to the soldiers to withdraw, but some of them were captured by the Israeli army and were executed.
“We located the bodies of some 40 Egyptian soldiers”, Al Sadeq stated, “all were shot in the head, we also observed prints of tanks that had driven over their bodies”.
