BICOM

Jerusalem and Cairo are involved in intensive negotiations to secure the release of Ouda Tarabin, an Israeli Bedouin jailed in Egypt for over a decade for alleged espionage, Egypt’s media reported yesterday.

Egypt’s state-run Al-Ahram reported that Tarabin and several other Israelis convicted of spying would be exchanged for 65 Egyptians held in Israeli jails. The Egyptian daily reported that Egypt’s authorities have also been in contact with their Israeli counterparts in order to ascertain the conditions of Egyptian prisoners, who last month joined hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in an indefinite hunger strike.

Tarabin, 31, has been held in Egypt since 1999, when he was sentenced in absentia under the country’s Emergency Law to 15 years in prison for espionage. Israel’s government and Tarabin’s family have rejected accusations of espionage as baseless, and the prisoner’s brother maintains he had crossed into Egypt merely to visit their sister in El-Arish.

Speculation over Tarabin’s release began during last year’s US-mediated Egyptian-Israeli negotiations for the release of Ilan Grapel, an Israeli-American law student held for nearly five months on charges of spying for Israel. Grapel was freed last October year in exchange for 25 Egyptian security prisoners. At the time, Druze MK Ayoub Kara (Likud) unsuccessfully lobbied US Ambassador Daniel Shapiro to include Tarabin in the deal.

The Tarabin Bedouin are a large tribe spread across the Negev and Sinai. In the Negev, the Tarabins’ territory is concentrated around Beersheba, while in Sinai, their lands are situated along the Israeli border south of the resort of El- Arish as well as on the Gulf of Suez and on the Red Sea around Nuweiba.