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Egypt denounces U.S. remarks on crackdown as "ignorant"

02 August 2014 21:51 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. The Egyptian Foreign Ministry denounced in a statement on Saturday the recent remarks of the U.S. Department of State that said Egypt used the U.S. military aids in crackdown "against their own people," APA reports quoting Xinhua

"These remarks show lack of understanding and complete ignorance of the reality of things in Egypt," Egyptian Foreign Ministry spokesman Badr Abdel-Aaty said, adding that the so-called Egyptian peaceful protesters referred to in the U.S. remarks " carried weapons and horrified innocent people."

On Thursday, Marie Harf, deputy spokesperson of the U.S. Department of State, explained in a press briefing why the United States suspended its annual aid to Egypt while it continued to Israel.

"In Egypt, you had a government cracking down on its own people. In Israel, you had a government fighting an external threat coming from Gaza that is from a terrorist organization," Harf told reporters.

Since the overthrow of Egypt's first democratically-elected president Mohamed Morsi by the military in July 2013, following mass protests against his one-year rule, the United States suspended a large part of its 1.5-billion-dollar annual aid to the turmoil-stricken country.

The Egyptian interim leadership launched a massive security crackdown on Morsi's supporters that left at least 1,000 killed and thousands more arrested over the past 11 months.

Abdel-Aaty further described Harf's remarks as "nonobjective," explaining that the remarks disregarded the fact that the Egyptian forces used Apaches and F-16 jets only against terrorists who carried out operations that killed many police and military men.

Harf said the situations in Egypt and Israel were "not comparable," justifying the Israeli use of force against the Palestinian civilians as "legitimate self-defense."

The ongoing Israeli offensive against the Palestinian Hamas- ruled Gaza Strip left more than 1,660 killed and about 9,000 injured so far, while Hamas attacks killed at least 60 Israeli soldiers and three civilians during the conflict according to official reports.

"The U.S. remarks lacked credibility and objectiveness by drawing unacceptable and unjustifiable comparison between Egypt and Israel while commenting on the Israeli constant aggression on the Gaza Strip that led to the killing of Palestinian civilians," the Egyptian Foreign Ministry spokesman said.