Ousted President Hosni Mubarak denies accepting to relocate Palestinians to Sinai
Ousted President Hosni Mubarak denied showing willingness to relocate Palestinians to Sinai during a 1983 meeting with former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, he said in a Wednesday statement.
This comes in response to official documents published by the British Broadcast Corporation revealing the details of a February meeting which followed the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.
According to the documents, Mubarak proposed reaching a settlement regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict as a prerequisite to the United States’ request to relocate Palestinians to Sinai.
Mubarak’s meeting with Thatcher took place during his return from a visit to the United States, eight months after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
Mubarak then revealed that Israel had proposed in 2010 to allocate an area in Sinai for the relocation of Palestinians as part of a proposal exchange lands by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which he rejected.
The BBC documents were revealed amid a controversy in Egypt following comments made by an Israeli Minister that a Palestinian State is only possible in Sinai.
Egyptian Foreign Affairs Minister, Sameh Shoukry responded in a televised interview, saying that Egypt refuses to engage in any discussions undermining state sovereignty over its territory, especially Sinai.
This is not the first time this controversial issue has circulated. Another minister in Israel made similar comments on Twitter in February in reference to a meeting between US President Donald Trump with Netanyahu, when they discussed what the Israeli Minister called “the plan for a Palestinian State in Gaza and Sinai instead of the West Bank.”
At the time, Trump said in a press conference with Netanyahu that there will be a large-scale peace process that involves the inclusion of more Arab allies.
Consequently, lawyer Khaled Ali filed a lawsuit in the Administrative Court demanding the state to issue a decree prohibiting the settlement on non-Egyptians in Sinai.
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