Remains of Egyptian soldier missing since 1967 Six Day War found in Sinai

A human rights group on Saturday asked Egypt’s citizens and Defense Ministry to help locate the family of an Egyptian soldier whose remains were recently found in the Sinai Peninsula, 57 years after he was killed in the Six Day War.

The organization, which is dedicated to promoting human rights in the Sinai and other marginalized areas of Egypt, said on social media that the remains of Fawzi Muhammad Abdel Mawla were found in early June near the central Sinai city of Al-Hassana. Mawla was discovered along with still-intact identification documents and some personal effects, according to the Sinai Foundation for Human Rights.

The group said it had contacted the Egyptian Defense Ministry via fax on July 1, but had yet to receive a response.

The documents showed that Mawla was born on January 18, 1945, and hailed from Wadi al-Qumar, west of Alexandria. The group said he was likely killed during the Egyptian army’s retreat from the Sinai Peninsula on the third day of the June 1967 war. Mawla would have been 22 at the time.

The Sinai Foundation cited locals in Al-Hassana who claimed that the Israeli military had killed some 700 captured Egyptian soldiers in the area.

This “may explain the presence of Egyptian military bones and clothing that residents of Al-Hassana have constantly found over the past decades,” the organization said.

The group said that roughly 9,800 Egyptian soldiers who went missing during the Six Day War were declared legally dead in 1971.

Identification documents of Fawzi Muhammad Abdel Mawla, located along with the 22-year-old soldier’s remains near the central Sinai town of Al-Hasana, where he is thought to have been killed in June 1967, when the Egyptian army retreated westward on the third day of the Six Day War. (Sinai Foundation for Human Rights)

In 2022, a mass grave containing the remains of about 80 Egyptian commandos was discovered. They were buried underneath Kibbutz Nahshon, near Latrun — the site of some of the harshest battles of the Six Day War. Then-Israeli prime minister Yair Lapid assured Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi that Israel would probe the matter, but the results of the investigation have not yet been published, according to the Sinai Foundation.

The war began on June 5, 1967, with a preemptive Israeli airstrike that rendered inoperable the air forces of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq.

The airstrike came at the end of a number of tense weeks in which Egyptian radio routinely broadcast genocidal threats to Israeli Jews, just 22 years after the Holocaust. In tandem, Egyptian strongman Gamal Abdel-Nasser kicked United Nations peacekeepers out of the Sinai Peninsula, where they had been stationed since the 1956 Suez crisis. Nasser also blocked the Tiran Straits, choking off one of Israel’s southern maritime routes.

Israel’s stunning victory saw it conquer the Golan Heights, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula. The latter was returned to Egypt in 1978, under the Camp David peace accords signed by prime minister Menachem Begin and Nasser’s successor Anwar Sadat, five years after Sadat spearheaded the shock assault that began the Yom Kippur War.