STORY EMERGES OF EGYPT'S CASUALTIES
With the announcement by Israeli military authorities in Tel Aviv June 19 that the number of Arab soldiers killed in the Sinai desert was around 20,000 instead of the figure of 7,000 or 8,000 originally announced, the true story began to emerge of some of the horrors of the Israeli blitzkrieg.
The figure of 20,000 refers to those killed; total casualties, which includes wounded and missing, were far higher.
In the June 20 issue of the Paris daily Le Monde, Eric Rouleau estimates the number of wounded in the hospitals of the United Arab Republic may reach as high as 30,000.
In two hospitals alone, in the suburbs of Cairo, there are some 3,000 wounded. Rouleau visited these two establishments and talked with many of the soldiers under treatment.
Dr. Mansour, the chief of staff, told him: "We received more wounded than we expected. More than 75 percent of them were suffering from napalm burns, to such an extent that I and my colleagues estimate that less than 50 percent will survive."
In one of the modern rooms of the Helmieh hospital Rouleau saw Lt. Mustapha El Khodari, a doomed man. All the features of his face were burned away. His body was a charred mass. In the neighboring bed, Col. Kamal El Roubi, his body wrapped like a mummy, lay paralyzed from head to foot from napalm. He could barely whisper. On June 6, he said, Israeli Mirages pursued his unit as it fled and dumped devastating flames on then.
Lt. Choukry Hanna, writhing with pain, recounted his experience. "I am the only survivor of a company of infantry that was composed of a hundred men. On June 5, the first day of hostilities, an Israeli reconnaissance plane flew over our trenches at Oum Koutaief in the Ogueila area. A little later other planes appeared and showered us with napalm. My comrades burned like torches. Only one of them escaped with me. We were going on foot to the Suez when a Bedouin offered to take us on his camel. An Israeli plane spotted us the next morning. He machinegunned us. The camel was killed, but once again we miraculously escaped death. When we reached the Suez, my comrade died from his burns. As for me, I managed to reach an Egyptian town."
Rouleau reports hearing of many cases in which the Israelis used torture.
"At the Meadi hospital, Corporal Souweilam Abdel Rassoul Gadallah, 22, a member of a tank unit, stated that he had been submitted to torture by members of the Israeli intelligence service. His body riddled with bullets, immobile, with an expression of terror on his face, his voice breaking, he replied in monosyllables to the questions of the journalists. Captured at Rafah, when he attempted to escape he was taken to an isolated spot behind a dune where a kind of gallows had been set up. He was bound with chains, he said, hung up by the feet and beaten with a rifle butt while the Israeli officers questioned him. When he refused to talk, bursts of machine-gun fire were aimed in his direction, the shots striking his feet, his legs, his arm (it had to be amputated later). He was given nothing to eat or drink for 62 hours. Not far from him a canvas water bag leaked water drop by drop..."
Mohamed Moutawan died on the operating table, doctors told the journalists, when his two legs were amputated for gangrene. After walking 50 kilometers to the Suez, he was picked up by the Israelis and returned to his point of departure. He made it to the Suez again only to meet with the same treatment again. After a few more repetitions, his feet were so bad that gangrene had set in. The Israelis then let him go.