Egypt's Morsi's advisor repeats calls for Camp David amendment

Mohamed Esmat Seif El-Dawla warns that Egypt's Sinai peninsula will remain threatened by reoccupation unless the peace treaty with Israel is amended

Egypt does not practise its sovereignty over Sinai, President Mohamed Morsi's advisor, the political analyst Mohamed Esmat Seif El-Dawla told Al Ahram's Arab affairs magazine, Al-Ahram Al-Arabi. Seif El-Dawla said Clause 4 of Egypt's Camp David treaty with Israel limits Egypt's freedom and must be amended before Sinai is fully lost.
The presidential advisor has repeatedly pleaded for the amendment of the article, prompting Yasser Ali, President Morsi's spokesman, to deny any connection between Seif El-Dawla's statement and Egypt's position in response to Israeli reproach.
The 4th clause deals with the international monitors supervising area C as laid down in the military appendix of the treaty; Seif El-Dawla says the peace keeping forces there are Israel's friends, as professed by Israel's Home Front Defense Minister Avi Dichter, and don't belong to the United Nations.
Further stressing his concern, Seif El-Dawla told Al-Ahram Al-Arabi in an interview to be published on Saturday that Israel has threatened to reoccupy Sinai on several occasions.
Israel asked the US for the green light to take Sinai during Egypt's spat with the Washington in the famous foreign NGO workers case, where dozens of foreigners were tried for working without official permission. The US repatriated its charged citizens in a US plane after Egyptian authorities mysteriously lifted their travel bans.
Seif El-Dawla also contended that with the current security arrangement stipulated in the treaty, there is always the risk of a repeat of the 1956 attack on Egypt, in which Israel took part, and the aftermath of the 1973 war, when Israel occupied the peninsula.
"We were stunned when Israel threatened us with Sinai several times; the first was in June 2011, when Egypt's then foreign minister Nabil El-Arabi said that Egypt will no longer be a strategic treasure to Israel, after which Israel's News1 website leaked that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called US President Barack Obama to tell him that all options – including the reoccupation of Sinai – are open," Seif El-Dawla said.
In August 2011, he added, while a million man march raged in Cairo, five Egyptian soldiers were killed by Israeli soldiers on the Egyptian-Israeli border. The third threat, Seif El-Islam proclaimed, was during the NGO debacle, when an Egyptian officer stated to a television channel that the US workers were allowed to travel after Washington warned of a punitive action in Sinai.
Seif El-Islam told Al-Ahram Al-Arabi that Israel "doesn't want to touch Camp David as if it were above the constitution, the Quran and the Bible, and this cannot be accepted with any degree of national dignity; we insist on amending it. There are clauses in the treaty that give us that right."
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