EGYPT ON ALERT AFTER ISRAEL EMBASSY ATTACK

[Three people were killed in clashes overnight between police and protesters outside Israel’s embassy in Cairo, and a fourth died of a heart attack, Egyptian hospital sources said on Saturday. Medics said the bodies of those killed were taken to three hospital morgues in the capital, but they did provide the exact cause of death. The health ministry had earlier reported one fatality from a heart attack.]

 

Agence France Presse

 Associated Press

A protester holds the Egyptian national flag as a fire burnsoutside
the building housing the Israeli Embassy in Cairo.caption

CAIRO: Egypt declared a state of alert today after protesters stormed the building housing Israel’s embassy and clashed with police, prompting a mass evacuation of the ambassador and other staff. 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the mob attack a “serious incident,” while US President Barak Obama asked Egypt to protect the embassy housed in a high-rise building overlooking the Nile.

An Israeli official said Ambassador Yitzhak Levanon, other staff and dependents had all left Egypt but a senior diplomat remained behind.

“We left the deputy ambassador to keep up contact with the Egyptian government,” the official told AFP in Jerusalem on condition of anonymity.

He said six embassy staff were plucked to safety by Egyptian commandos.

The attack on the embassy was the worst since Israel established its mission in Egypt after becoming the first Arab country to sign a peace treaty with the Jewish state in 1979. 

The violence is also the worst episode in tense relations between Egypt and Israel since the killing of five Egyptian policemen last month on the border as Israel hunted militants after a deadly attack.

One person died of a heart attack overnight and around 450 people were injured, Egypt’s health ministry said.

Protesters demolished a security wall around the mission with sledgehammers, removed the Israeli flag and entered the embassy, grabbing thousands of documents which they dumped to cheering crowds.

Hundreds of soldiers backed by armoured cars rushed to the area after Obama called on Cairo to protect the embassy.

Interior Minister Mansur al-Eissawy declared a state of high alert, cancelling all police leave, while Prime Minister Essam Sharaf called for an emergency cabinet meeting today.

Quoting an “informed source” government daily Al-Ahram reported on its website that “there is clear intention that the government will submit its resignation after its failure to contain” the violence.

The embassy attack came as about 1,000 protesters marched to the mission from Tahrir Square where thousands had massed to press Egypt’s military rulers to keep promises of reform after a January-February revolt ousted president Hosni Mubarak.

Protesters hacked away at a protection wall surrounding the high-rise building housing the embassy while staff were trapped inside.

Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak said he called US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta early today to request help protecting their embassy in Cairo’s Giza district.

Three killed

CAIRO: Three people were killed in clashes overnight between police and protesters outside Israel’s embassy in Cairo, and a fourth died of a heart attack, Egyptian hospital sources said on Saturday. Medics said the bodies of those killed were taken to three hospital morgues in the capital, but they did provide the exact cause of death. The health ministry had earlier reported one fatality from a heart attack.

 

 

ISRAELIS QUIT CAIRO EMBASSY AS PROTESTERS INVADE OFFICES

[The violence also raised concerns about whether Egypt’s military-led transitional government would be able to maintain law and order and meet its international obligations, and to what extent popular rage unleashed by the Arab Spring would send a chill over the region.] 

By David Kirkpatrick And Ethan Bronner 

CAIRO — Israel sent a pair of military jets into Cairo at dawn on Saturday to evacuate its embassy staff after six members had been trapped in the embassy overnight by thousands of protesters who invaded the building and tossed documents from the windows.

As an angry mob stormed the embassy and tore down its flag for the second time in a month, Israel appealed to the United States for help. Coming a week after Turkey expelled Israel’s ambassador over its refusal to apologize for a deadly raid on a Turkish ship, the attack left Israel facing crises in relations with its two most important regional allies, and ambassadors in neither country.

The violence also raised concerns about whether Egypt’s military-led transitional government would be able to maintain law and order and meet its international obligations, and to what extent popular rage unleashed by the Arab Spring would send a chill over the region.

Throughout the night, desperate Israeli officials had placed several calls to their American counterparts seeking help to pressure the Egyptians to take more action to protect the embassy. Defense Minister Ehud Barak called Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called President Obama, Israeli and American officials said.

In Washington, the White House said in a statement that Mr. Obama had “expressed his great concern” about the embassy situation in his conversation with Mr. Netanyahu. The statement said Mr. Obama called on the government of Egypt “to honor its international obligations to safeguard the security of the Israeli Embassy.”

Israeli officials said the six trapped embassy staff members were rescued by Egyptian commandos early Saturday morning, after hours when Egyptian military and security forces had appeared to stand idle on the sidelines for fear of confronting the mob.

“This went on for 13 hours and there was real concern for the safety and lives of our people,” an Israeli official said. “The mob penetrated the embassy and at the end there was only one wall separating it from six of our people.”

Israel flew out its ambassador and about 85 other diplomats and family members, leaving behind only one diplomat, the deputy ambassador, who took refuge in the American Embassy, diplomats familiar with the arrangements said.

For Israel, the embassy attack and evacuation represented the most ominous deterioration yet in its relationship with its neighbor in the seven months since the revolution that ousted former President Hosni Mubarak, a strongman who suppressed the Egyptian public’s hostility to Israel to keep his country’s alliance with Israel and the United States a guiding principle of its foreign policy.

The Egyptian prime minister, Essam Sharaf, who serves under the council of military officers acting as a transitional government, called an emergency cabinet meeting on Saturday as the Egyptian Interior Ministry put the police on alert to guard against more violence.

For Egypt’s interim military rulers, allowing the invasion of a foreign embassy is an extraordinary breach of Egypt’s international commitments that is raising security concerns at other embassies as well.

“It has led to a complete loss of credibility in the government internationally from all directions,” a Western diplomat said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the situation. And it poses a new dilemma for the military council, which has sought to avoid confrontations with protesters and, often, to accede to the popular will to guard its own tenuous legitimacy.

It was the second time in four weeks that Egypt and Israel stood on the brink, following a dispute last month over the killing of three Egyptian soldiers along the border by Israeli military forces pursuing terrorist suspects. And it comes at a time when Israel is feeling new pressures from all sides, with the Palestinians gathering support in the United Nations General Assembly for a bid to establish their nominal statehood next month and the expulsion of Israel’s ambassador from Turkey.

For some, the image of the fleeing diplomats boarding jets at dawn evoked comparisons with the 1979 evacuation of the Israeli Embassy in Tehran after the Iranian revolution replaced a former ally with an implacable foe.

“Seven months after the downfall of Hosni Mubarak’s regime, Egyptian protesters tore to shreds the Israeli flag, a symbol of peace between Egypt and its eastern neighbor, after 31 years,” Aluf Benn, the editor in chief of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, wrote Saturday. “It seems that the flag will not return to the flagstaff anytime soon.”

The attack on the embassy marked a new turn toward violence in the previously peaceful protest movement that has flourished in Cairo’s Tahrir Square since the revolution. At a demonstration called Friday to reiterate a litany of liberal demands, thousands of hard-core soccer fans showed up looking for revenge on police officers who attacked some of them after a match earlier in the week, and they injected a new impulse toward mayhem into the day.

Exercising a new freedom of expression, Egyptians have staged protests outside the Israeli Embassy nearly every day since the Israeli killing of the Egyptian officers near the border, and last weekend the Egyptians erected a new wall in front of the embassy’s block to help protect the buildings from damage.

But on Friday demonstrators marched to the building carrying hammers and determined to tear it down, and after its demolition went on to break into the building while thousands of others clashed with riot police outside, hurling homemade incendiary devices and setting several cars on fire.

The Egyptian Interior Ministry said Saturday that at least two people had died in the clashes around the embassy, one from a bullet wound and one from a heart attack, while as many as 1,200 had been injured from the overnight clashes with the police. As late as Saturday afternoon, enough tear gas lingered in the streets around the embassy to force passers-by to clutch tissues over their noses.

Since the dispute over the border killings last month, many Egyptians have clamored for Egypt to expel Israel’s ambassador. When word reached the crowds outside the Israeli Embassy on Saturday morning that Israel was evacuating its ambassador, some reacted with satisfaction that the attack on the embassy had succeeded.

On Saturday, though, Egyptian politicians at every level, from the young leaders of the revolution to the older liberals and Islamists, spoke out against the violence the night before. But Gamal Abdel Gawad, director of the Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, warned that given the popular pressure, repairing relations with Israel could be “an uphill battle.”

David Kirkpatrick reported from Cairo, and Ethan Bronner from Jerusalem. Heba Afify contributed reporting from Cairo.

@ The New York Times