EGYPT: Without Mercy

• Share

At 8 o'clock one morning last week Dr. Moussa Li to Marzuk, 28, a surgeon in Egypt's Jewish Hospital, walked out of his solitary cell in a Cairo prison. As a rabbi intoned Hebrew prayers, the executioner seized the white-faced surgeon, cuffed his hands in leather, bound his eyes in black cloth, led him into the death chamber, closed the door, and snapped the gallows trap. Half an hour later, 26-year-old Samuel Azar, a teacher, walked the same path of no return, and the ancient and endless quarrels of the Middle East were washed with the fresh blood of two men.

Marzuk and Azar died convicted of spying for Israel, despite protests at the severity of the sentence from the French and U.S. governments, the International League for the Rights of Man. and many other groups. Egypt's army junta bristled at such "interference" from outside.

Actually, Lieut. Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser's government was in something of a box. It hesitated to show more mercy to two Zionists than it had to six Moslem Brotherhood leaders hanged last December despite official pleas from Syria. Lebanon and Indonesia.

In Israel, .streets fluttered with black-draped flags, and the Knesset was crowded with grim-faced Israelis assembled to hear Premier Moshe Sharett say: "Egypt will not be sustained by the blood it has thus spilled. The devotion to Zion of untold numbers of Jews was not stifled in the past by persecution, nor will it be in the future."