CAIRO: After sparking an international outcry over claims that Israel executed Egyptian prisoners of war in 1967’s Six Day War, the Israeli maker of “The Shaked Spirit Ran Edelist now says the documentary made no such claims.
According to a report published in The Jerusalem Post, Edelist said that the incident in question which took place outside Al Arish in Sinai was a battle between the famed Israeli battalion and Palestinian commandos technically under the auspices of the Egyptian military.
The battle was controversial, Edelist says, not because it ended with the execution of unarmed prisoners, but because some of the Israeli soldiers feared they used disproportionate force against the poorly armed Palestinian fighters.
In Egypt, some opposition members took what they said, twisted it and added a simple lie to harm the peace process and Mubarak, Edelist said.
He says part of the problem is that few people have actually watched his film, despite the uproar it has caused.
Israeli Infrastructure Minister, Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, has also firmly denied the war crimes charges against the Shaked battalion, which he led during the Six Day War.
Due to the outcry caused by the film, Ben Eliezer cancelled an official visit to Cairo this week.
“It s true that in that war the unit killed fedayeen [resistance fighters] who operated in the Gaza Strip against Israel and against the battalion I commanded. But they were not murdered, they were killed in battle, he said.
Responding to the suggestion that troops under his command used disproportionate force against a weaker enemy, Ben-Eliezer said that the army’s conventional wisdom at the time was that there was no problem to say the battalion is retreating … (but) they are armed and we need to chase them.
In a statement from the Israeli Foreign Ministry, the government expressed alarm that certain elements in Egypt are misrepresenting the documentary film, without checking the facts or substantiating what actually happened, with the intent of sabotaging our two countries relationship.
