Calls for investigation into disappearance of Palestinians in Egypt

A senior Palestinian politician has called for a committee to investigate the abduction of four Palestinians in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula last week.

First Deputy Speaker of the Palestinian Parliament Ahmed Bahar, speaking during a protest by relatives of the abductees on Wednesday, said that a joint Egyptian-Palestinian committee should be created in order to “look into all the details of the abduction to reveal the reasons and punish the perpetrators".

Abd al-Basit Abd al-Dayim, Abdullah Said Abdullah Abu Jibbeen, Yasir Fathi Misbah Zanoun and Hussein Khamis al-Thabda, reportedly members of the armed wing of Hamas, were abducted last Wednesday after a bus travelling from Gaza through the Rafah crossing was stopped by masked gunmen.

Egyptian officials reportedly told Ma'an News that the four men were to be used by the Egyptian Islamic State (IS) affiliate Wilayet Sinai as a bargaining chip to force Hamas to release some 50 Salafists currently imprisoned in Gaza.

“The abduction is a political, legal and ethical crime and a dangerous attempt to drag the Gaza Strip and the Palestinian resistance into the trap of chaos,” said Bahar.

He described the abduction as an attempt to “cause a problem between the Palestinian and Egyptian brothers and to undermine the real efforts aiming to repair the officials’ relations with Egypt.”

Relations between Hamas and the Egyptian government have been at a nadir since the 2013 coup which threw the Muslim Brotherhood-backed government of Mohamed Morsi out of power.

The government of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has accused Hamas, who are linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, of supporting militant groups in the Sinai Peninsula who are seeking to overthrow the Egyptian government by force.

However, a decision by an Egyptian court in June to strip Hamas of its designation as a terrorist group suggested to some that relations could be set to improve.

The Sinai Peninsula has been the at the heart of an insurgency in Egypt led by Wilayat Sinai since 2013, taking advantage of the instability and mounting anger following the military coup.

Earlier this month, Wilayat Sinai executed a Croatian hostage who had been abducted near Cairo.