Israeli War Prisoners' Maltreatment Exposed
By ELIAHU SALPETER
Realizing all this, it is easy to
Inc.)
understand why the Israeli govern-
JERUSALEM — Authorized re- ment was in no special hurry to
ports as well as rumors have been release two Algerian officials who
multiplying in recent weeks about arrived at Lydda airport after
the worsening maltreatment of boarding a plane scheduled for
Israeli prisoners in Arab jails. stopover in Israel rather than one
Except for one, Shmuel Rosen- destined for Lebanon. One, imme-
wasser, a Metullah nightwatchman diately identified as a major and
who had been abducted by Arab top aide of President Boumedienne,
terrorists and is being held some- later was also identified as a key
(Copyright 1970, JTA,
dence— what irony of fate! —not
only interrogated the passengers
the Egyptians across the Suez
Canal, including two Israeli civil-
ian employees of a mobile canteen
that was "gloriously" ambushed
on a deserted road not far from
the Canal.
Israel holds 69 Egyptian and 39
Syrian prisoners. Some of them
are pilots, but most are soldiers
captured in abortive Egyptian and
(one or two) Syrian attempts to
cross the Bar-Lev line or the Israel
front-line on the Golan Heights.
There are also a few Egyptian
fishermen whose boats have en-
tered Israeli territorial waters and
are awaiting repatriation.
Some of the most horrible
stories of torture of war prison-
ers have come out of Syria—a
signer, like other Arab states, of
the International Red Cross
Agreement guaranteeing the hu-
mane treatment of prisoners of
war.
After the Six-Day War in 1967,
the Syrians exchanged the several
Israeli prisoners in their hands for
the hundreds of their officers and
men captured on the Golan
Heights. Later there was another
exchange for two Syrian jet pilots
who by mistake landed near Haifa
and one of whom happened to be
related to a top Damascus official.
At least two Israeli prisoners in
the past have lost their sanity as
a result of the tortures in Syria
and at least one is known to have
committed suicide. It is believed
that one Israeli pilot, whose plane
had been hit by Syrian ground fire
during the June, 1967 war chose
to crash with his plane rather than
bail out and fall into Syrian hands.
Until recently—and with some
horrid exceptions such as the hack-
ing to pieces of an Israeli pilot
on the spot where he parachuted
during the Six-Day War — the
Egyptians have behaved tolerably
toward Israeli prisoners—at least
in Arab terms. However, in recent
months, more and more rough
methods are being used to extract
WHERE
PRICE SELLS
of the El Al plane kidnaped two
years ago by Arab terrorists to
Algiers, but also played a role in
Boumedienne's refusal to release
the male passengers and crew
before Israel agreed to release a
large number of Arab terrorists.
(The other Algerian, first identi-
SO DOES
GEORGE RUSKIN
NORTHLAND FORD
fied as a "'businessman" was later
where in Jordan, all the rest are figure of the Algerian intelligence also discovered to be an intelli-
prisoners of war held in Egypt and service and, according to some evi- gence official.)
Syria. Egypt has 13 of them, Syria
two. Some of them are pilots THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
Friday, September '11, 1970-15
whose planes have been shot down
by Russian-made jets or Russian-
made (and apparently Russian-
manned) SAM missiles. Others
were seized in the few successful
commando raids carried out by
NORTHLAND FORD
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military information from those
captured, including beating of
badly wounded prisoners.
Mrs. Meir disclosed recently
that wounded prisoners refuse
to take medicine because they
suspect that the Egyptians
"spike" it with "truth drugs" to
facilitate such attempts — com-
pletely forbidden, of course, by
the Geneva Convention on the
Treatment of War Prisoners.
The insufficient medical care
received by most Israeli prisoners
is attributed more to the general
standard of Egyptian medicine and
the qualifications of the physicians
whom Cairo assigns to treat them,
rather than any intentional negli-
gence by the doctors themselves,
some of whom, actually, have
made rather creditable efforts to
help the Israeli patients. Never-
theless, the case of an Israeli
pilot who was shot down in July
and died of a "heart attack" two
days later—after his post-capture
phcto, showing him smiling, ap-
peared in the Cairo papers—causes
the gravest concern in Israel.
What makes suspiCons of what
the Egyptians may have done to
him even more acute, is the fact
that for weeks—and despite Inter-
national Red Cross efforts — they
have refused to hand over his body
to Israel, a routine matter on both
sides in the past.
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