Israeli PM says he does not believe Israel should rush to amend ’peace treaty’ with Egypt

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that he does not believe Israel should rush to amend the peace treaty with Israel.

"If we are going to alter the peace treaty with Egypt – and I don't think that it is something we need to rush into – it must be approved by the cabinet," Netanyahu said Sunday during a meeting with Likud ministers.

Recently, senior Israel Defense Forces officials said that Israel should consider amending its peace treaty with Egypt so as to allow the Egyptian Army to increase its presence in Sinai in light of the deteriorating security situation there.

Netanyahu, however, stressed that Israel must first take care of its security issues and also examine more closely the situation in Sinai. "We must take care of security, terror problems in particular, and we need to invest more resources in tackling obstacles," Netanyahu said. "We are in continued contacts with the Egyptian government and we are trying to navigate these contacts intelligently."

On Saturday, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said that Israel does not intend to approve additional Egyptian troops in the eastern Sinai Peninsula, despite reports in Haaretz and the British weekly The Economist on Friday in which he said it was in Israel's interest to allow Egypt to bring in larger forces to overcome the ongoing anarchy along the border with the occupied territories.

Earlier, Barak said that since the fall of the regime of former president Hosni Mubarak in February, Israel had "on several occasions" approved Egyptian requests to allow extra forces into the peninsula. "Since the latest crisis, we let them send in battalions on several occasions," he told public radio referring to the fall of Mubarak and pointing out that Sinai covers an area which is more than three times the size of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip. "The matter was requested by them on a temporary basis to ensure that the gas pipelines are not blown up, so that (the Egyptian port city of) El-Arish wouldn't be taken over by the Bedouins, and in order to allow the shared fight against terrorism to continue," he said.
  
"We have an interest in stability, we have an interest in the problem being resolved on the other side" of the border, Barak said, while stressing the paramount importance of the peace treaty for the two neighbors.
  
Several days after the operation began, public radio reported that Netanyahu had given Cairo the green light increase its troops in Sinai in order to "restore order" there.