Egypt denies impact of Israel shipping line on Suez Canal

Egypt yesterday denied that Israel’s new shipping lines between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean  had affected the use of the Suez Canal.

The Suez Canal Authority said in a statement that the canal route will remain the shortest and safest link between East and West, as shipping containers transported through the canal can carry larger quantities of goods, at a lower cost than any land routes.

This comes after Arab media and news agencies reported that the Suez Canal will be negatively affected by the land shipping lines that Israel is preparing to operate, especially in transporting oil and its derivatives from the port of Eilat in the Red Sea to Ashkelon port in the Mediterranean.

According to the Suez Canal Authority’s statement, the navigation traffic is running at normal rates, noting that 2020 revenues reached about $5.61 billion, with 18,829 ships passing through the waterway with a net payload of 1.17 billion tonnes, marking the second highest net annual tonnage in the canal’s history.

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The statement added: “It is expected that the impact of the pipeline, when it is operational, will not exceed 12-16 percent of the volume of crude oil trade heading northward.”

The statement asserted that the Gulf countries export large quantities of crude oil to the Asian market, especially China, India, South Korea and Japan.

In the last quarter of last year, the Israeli company Europe-Asia Lines and the UAE company MED-RED Land Bridge Limited signed a memorandum of understanding for cooperation in the field of transporting crude oil between the Gulf countries.

The agreement aims to develop new and existing infrastructure to transport oil from the Gulf states to markets in Europe, most of which currently passes through the Suez Canal.

According to the Foreign Policy magazine, trade traffic in the Suez Canal is expected to decrease by more than 17 per cent once the Eilat-Ashkelon pipeline operations get underway as a result of the UAE-Israel deal.

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