Ex-Morsi officials refute Abbas' claims on resettlement of refugees in Sinai

Former Egyptian officials have refuted recent statements by Palestinian Authority President, Mahmoud Abbas, wherein he referred to ousted President Mohamed Morsi.

In a speech to the Palestinian National Council, in Ramallah on Monday, Abbas said: “During the rule of Morsi, he offered to give us a part of Sinai for our people to live there under a project called the Giora Eiland Plan, but we rejected it.”

Abbas continued, Hamas had agreed to the notion of a “state with temporary borders”.

Abbas made a similar statement in an interview with Egyptian journalists in November 2015, saying that during the rule of former President Mohamed Morsi, he had rejected an Israeli offer to receive 1,000 kilometres out of Sinai.

A former presidential adviser, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Quds Press that “President Morsi had never made this offer to Abbas during their meeting in 2012, and this matter had not been put forward during their discussions.”

The former adviser said that “it is unreasonable that Morsi would make this step in favour of the Israeli occupation, he who has always avoided mentioning its name.” He pointed out that “Abbas is doing so to discredit Hamas and Morsi, by claiming their agreement on this matter and this is a lie,” as he put it.

Yehia Hamed, Former Minister of Investment in the government of Morsi, denied President Abbas’s statements, saying: “they are lies and there is no evidence for their validity.”

In a statement on his official Facebook page, Hamed described Abbas as “a trifling politician who has no dignity and does not deserve a response to his lies.” He continued: “God bless Abu Ammar, he did not know that his successor would be as cowardly a politician as Abbas, who is not feared by enemies and is despised by the resistance.”

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He continued by saying that “Mahmoud Abbas is practicing the dirtiest type of politics and blatantly lying, claiming that President Dr. Mohamed Morsi had offered him a part of Sinai.” He described President Abbas as a “traitor to his cause and the blood of the Palestinian martyrs and submissive to the Zionist entity.”

Further, former Minister of Planning and International Cooperation Amr Darrag, condemned what he considered as “Mahmoud Abbas’s false allegations against President Morsi.”

مداخلتي على #قناة_الشرق حول التصريحات المشينة لمحمود عباس في حق الرئيس #مرسيhttps://t.co/4BLtfTCWHH

— Amr Darrag (@amr_darrag) May 2, 2018

In statements he posted on his Twitter account, he said: “This man lies as he breathes, and his allegations about President Morsi are nothing more than a cheap lie which he uses to outbid his people.”

All of the people know President Morsi’s position on the Palestinian cause, and if he had really agreed on this, the coup would not have happened against him.

Channel 7, revealed in a previous report, that President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi was the one who offered Mahmoud Abbas proposal to join 1600 kilometres of the territory of North Sinai to the Gaza Strip, making its area five times larger than its current area, provided that the Palestinian state would be declared in the Gaza Strip after reaching an agreement on initiating Palestinian autonomy in the West Bank.

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However, the Foreign Ministry and the government of the Palestinian President Abbas had quickly denied the news after being leaked. The denial of the accusations against El-Sisi were covered in accusations of former president Morsi that he was the one who had offered to let off the Egyptian land.