WEST BANK (Al Jazeera) –
Zionist prime minister Yair Lapid has said his office will investigate reports of a mass grave in central parts of the occupied territories containing the bodies of Egyptian commandos who were killed during the 1967 Middle East war.
Lapid’s office said that Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi had brought up the issue in a call after two Israeli newspapers published witness accounts suggesting there was an unmarked grave near Latrun, an area between Al-Quds and Tel Aviv where the occupying regime’s army fought the Egyptian soldiers decades ago.
According to the statement, Lapid directed his military secretary “to examine the issue in depth and to update Egyptian officials”.
Egypt’s foreign ministry said in a statement the Egyptian embassy in Tel Aviv had been assigned to communicate with the Zionist regime authorities to “clarify what is being circulated in the media, call for an investigation to verify the credibility of this information, and urgently inform the Egyptian authorities of the relevant details”.
Newspapers Yedioth Ahronoth and Haaretz published archival material and interviews with residents recounting how dozens of Egyptian soldiers killed in the battle may be buried there.
According to the reports, about 80 Egyptian soldiers killed during the war were buried under what is now a tourist park.
The soldiers were reportedly killed on June 5, 1967, when fighting broke out between Zionist troops and a group of Egyptian soldiers in Kibbutz Nahshon, a settlement in the now illegally occupied West Bank.
After the troops were killed, Zionist regime authorities dug a 20-meter grave and buried the Egyptian soldiers’ bodies together, said the report.
Residents of the kibbutz attempted to speak out about the issue during the 1990s but were silenced by the regime’s army.
Known to the Arabs as the Naksa, meaning setback or defeat, the 1967 war saw the Zionist regime usurp the remaining Palestinian territories of the West Bank, East Al-Quds, Gaza Strip, the Syrian Golan Heights and the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula.
In January, Haaretz reported a mass grave of Palestinians killed by Zionist troops in the village of Tantura in 1948 was discovered under the car park of a beach.