Israel Claims Egypt Disguised Military Installation to Look Like School

Israel claimed today that Egypt deliberately disguised a military installation hit by the Israel Air Force on April 8 to make it look to foreign Journalists like a bombed out school. Cairo accused Israel last Wednesday of bombing a primary school in Bahr el Bakar, a village in the Nile delta, killing 30 children and one adult and wounding 36 children and ten adults. Israel disputed the charge and made public reconnaissance photographs that showed a military installation surrounded by barbed wire, trenches, check posts and military vehicles. According to an Israeli spokesman, the Egyptians worked frantically for three days to remove all traces of the military nature of the target. Jeeps and trucks were driven off, barbed wire was removed and trenches were filled. Only then were Journalists taken to the site, the spokesman said.

(London Times correspondent Paul Martin said in a dispatch from Bahr el Bakar today that he saw rubble of what was apparently a makeshift school house and no evidence of any military installations or military equipment in the vicinity. The Martin story, which was also carried today by the New York Times said, “Little remains to distinguish the school from other monuments of war save the torn and stained pages of elementary school books, splintered desks and blackboards scattered through the mass of rubble and twister iron.” Mr. Martin’s dispatch confirmed an Egyptian claim that the road from Husseiniya, where the bomb victims were hospitalized, to Bahr el Bakar was a hazardous one. That was given as an excuse by the Egyptians for not taking correspondents immediately to the alleged bombing site. Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Yosef Tekoah claimed in a letter to Secretary General U Thant last Thursday that the road was a good one and that the Egyptians were stalling for time while they concocted a “distorted” version of the April 8 events.)