CAIRO: The new documentary “Shakid Soul, which aired on Israel’s Channel One last week and showed the massacre of 250 Egyptian prisoners of war in Sinai in 1967, drove Egyptian MPs to consider filing charges against the Israeli officials responsible, said MP Mohamed Khalil Kwaitah.
A group of parliamentarians formed a committee to examine the possibility of filing these charges, after an Israeli documentary claimed that one of their military units called Shakid, was accountable for the death of 250 POWs.
I filed a request to investigate this crime in 1995, but it received no attention until now when this movie was shown, Kwaitah said.
Israeli s officials had acknowledged this crime more than once in different documentaries, Kwaitah added.
The crime, as Kwaitah described it, is horrible, the Israeli troops have brutally killed Egyptian prisoners of war. They tied their hands together and rolled over their live bodies with their tanks.
We demand an investigation of this incident and that the Israeli official who ordered the murders to be faced with the charge of committing war crimes, Kwaitah said.
Hamdy Hassan, a Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated MP told The Daily Star Egypt that Israel is flouting international conventions through the “audacity in showing that movie.
This movie is very provocative to the Egyptian people, Hassan added.
Gamal Eid, executive director of the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, supports the idea of investigating the event.
Prisoners of war have rights and their lives should not go in vain, Eid said.
But Eid does not believe that the government will take any action: They will not be cooperative in this matter.
Eid says that this is the fourth time that a request to investigate the issue of the victims of the 1967 war has been filed. “The Egyptian Organization for Human Rights was behind previous requests, he said.
Arial Sharon himself was involved in many violations against Egyptians prisoners in 1967, Eid alleged.
The murder of these POWs, according to Eid, is in violation of the Geneva Convention, the international law that set rules to protect prisoners’ human rights.
The Geneva Convention consists of four treaties: one for the wounded and sick soldiers in the field; one for wounded soldiers at sea; one for the treatment of war prisoners; and a last one for the treatment of civilians at times of war.
