Agence France-Presse CAIRO: Israel s offensive in the Palestinian territories is drawing fierce accusations in neighboring Egypt that the Jewish state is seeking to destabilize the region. Cairo newspapers as well as ruling party and opposition politicians are lashing out at Israel. Israel should not think that the peace reached with an Arab country can be guaranteed while it continues to perpetrate its crimes and aggressions, the head of the Egyptian parliament s foreign affairs committee told AFP. Mustafa Al-Fekki, a senior member of President Hosni Mubarak s ruling party, was referring to the peace treaty which Egypt signed with Israel in 1979. Israel sent tanks into the Gaza Strip on Wednesday in a bid to free a soldier captured by militants and also arrested members of the governing Hamas movement in the West Bank. The threat of a regional conflagration also loomed as Israeli warplanes on Wednesday overflew a palace of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad, whose country supports Palestinian and other armed groups in the region. Fekki also expressed fears that the flare-up could spill over into Egypt and threaten the country s security. The Egyptian parliament has expressed its concern for Egypt s borders and its peace deal. We respect it but the threats are coming from Israel, said Fekki. Two days earlier, Egypt sent more than 1,000 policemen to reinforce its paramilitary unit of border guards at the border with the southern Gaza Strip. Mufid Shehab, secretary of state for parliamentary affairs, on Wednesday openly accused Israel of threatening Egypt s stability. The threat for Egypt always comes from the east, he said, adding that Egypt s security is linked to the security of Palestine. Egypt is considered a major peace-broker in the region for its good ties with the Palestinians, Israel and Washington, and had launched an aborted mediation effort for the release of the Israeli soldier. The leader of the opposition Muslim Brotherhood, of which the Palestinian ruling party Hamas is an offshoot, denounced what it called a plot aimed at crushing the Palestinian people . Mohammed Mahdi Akef also launched a stinging attack on Arab governments. Is it even worth asking you to react, something you haven t done in a long time? State-owned and opposition newspapers alike published editorials condemning Israel s offensive. Israel s barbaric aggressions against Gaza show once again that its unilateral withdrawal was only a way of deceiving the international community, Morsi Atallah wrote in the top-selling state-owned daily Al Ahram. Israel is kicking up all this fuss simply because an Israeli soldier was kidnapped during a brave Palestinian operation while at the same time it continues to kill and abduct Palestinians, said Al Akhbar, another government daily. The independent Al-Masry Al-Youm asked why the international community continues to display sympathy with Israel when the latest Palestinian operation targeted the military and not civilians? In the streets of Cairo, many Egyptians took a fatalistic view of the fresh Israeli-Palestinian crisis. It s only one more sequence of violence. There was one last month, there will be another next month, said Mustafa Abdel Hafez, who studies computer science at the American University in Cairo. AFP
Israel offensive stirs anger in Egypt
