An Israeli police officer was lightly injured on Monday after being hit by a drug smuggler’s vehicle on the Israel-Egypt border, according to Hebrew media, confirming Egyptian media reports of a shootout between Israeli border guards and a group of smugglers in the Negev desert.
The Hebrew newspaper “Yisrael Hayom” reported that “an Israeli police officer was slightly injured when he was hit by a Razer ATV on the Israel-Egypt border this evening while the Israeli army was trying to stop drug smugglers at the scene of an accident.”
“Israeli soldiers opened fire on a four-wheeled vehicle that was speeding towards them, and the driver fled the scene,” she said. “IDF soldiers are searching for the suspects who fled the area.”
“During an operation in the area near the Egyptian border recently, Israeli forces encountered a vehicle speeding towards them,” the Israeli military said in a brief statement late Monday, adding that they were tracking the suspects and searching the area, but gave no details.
Egyptian authorities had not commented on the incident by 9 p.m. GMT, but the private Cairo news channel cited an unnamed “high-ranking” Egyptian source as denying the veracity of Hebrew media reports of a shooting incident on the Egypt-Israel border.
According to Egyptian sources, “what happened was a shootout between Israeli border guards and a group of smugglers in the Negev desert.”
There have been sporadic incidents of “clashes with drug smugglers” on the Egyptian-Israeli border, the most notable of which occurred in January when the Egyptian military announced it had killed one man and arrested six others after “interrupting a drug smuggling operation” south of the “Awza” border crossing on the Israeli border.
