Israeli minister blunders by praising Egypt’s assistance

AN ISRAELI minister has broken one of the Middle East’s key unwritten rules by publicly praising his country’s close security co-operation with Egypt, most of whose citizens fiercely resent its ties to the “Zionist state”.

Yuval Steinitz, the energy minister, revealed on Saturday that Egypt’s decision to flood 10 underground supply tunnels run by Hamas from the Egyptian Sinai into Gaza had been to a “certain extent at Israel’s request”. Security co-operation with Egypt was “better than ever”, he added.

His words were met with an immediate outcry from commentators and former ambassadors. “He said something that shouldn’t be said in so many words,” Eli Shaked, Israel’s former ambassador to Egypt, told The Telegraph.

Mr Steinitz was forced to retract his comments and apologise for the “unintended impression” his words had given but by then the damage was done.

Egypt flooded Hamas’s tunnels last Friday, the latest in a long series of moves against the group, with which Cairo has had fluctuating relations.

Since the coup led by current President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in July 2013, the Egyptian authorities have cracked down on its supply lines and increased security co-operation along the Israeli border to unprecedented levels.

This is no secret to the outside world but it is a potential source of instability inside Egypt, where the Arab world’s hatred of Israel is widely shared.

“The security coordination between the two countries is one of the most sensitive issues there is for the security establishment,” the Israeli commenta- tor Yossi Melman wrote in the Ma’ariv daily, adding that the comments reflected “the serious disease of uncontrollable talking” by Israeli officials.

Last week, a screening of an Israeli film in Cairo was cancelled by the Egyptian culture ministry to “prevent normalisation”. An Egyptian parliamentarian is also demanding an investigation into how a book by an Israeli author on Arab society was allowed to feature at a book fair in Cairo.

‘The security coordination between the two countries is one of the most sensitive issues there is.’