Cairo / Ibrahim Al-Khazen / Anatolia
The Egyptian Suez Canal Authority announced its commitment to implementing international agreements that guarantee freedom of maritime navigation for passing ships, “whether commercial or military, without distinction of their nationalities.”
This came in a statement by the Canal Authority, on Friday evening, which it said was “a response to questions circulated on some social media platforms about the Suez Canal Authority allowing warships of different nationalities to pass through the navigational channel,” without specifying those nationalities.
In the statement, the Suez Canal Authority affirmed its “commitment to implementing international agreements that guarantee freedom of maritime navigation for ships crossing the canal, whether commercial or military, without distinction as to the nationality of the ship.”
She stressed that this commitment “comes in line with the provisions of the Constantinople Agreement (1888), which constitutes a basic guarantee for preserving the canal’s status as the most important maritime corridor in the world.”
She explained that “the agreement has since determined the basic features of the nature of international dealings with the Suez Canal, as it has preserved the right of all countries to benefit from this global facility.”
The agreement stipulated in its first article that “the Suez Maritime Canal shall always be free and open, whether in time of war or in time of peace, to every commercial or military ship without distinction of its nationality,” according to the authority’s statement.
The Suez Canal Authority stressed that “the crossing of the Suez Canal by warships is subject to special procedures.”
The Authority did not clarify which countries these passing ships belong to, but it comes with the circulation of unconfirmed news on social media platforms about the passage of warships, and it was not immediately possible to obtain information about their nationalities from an official Egyptian source.
In two separate statements on Thursday and Friday, the Egyptian army confirmed the absence of any kind of cooperation with Israel, while the Egyptian Ministry of Transport explained that “the ship about which the controversy arose was carrying equipment for the Ministry of Military Production in Egypt,” without mentioning its nationality.
The Egyptian army’s statement “categorically denied what was being promoted about the Egyptian Armed Forces helping Israel in its military operations after what was circulated on social media and suspicious accounts.”
The Egyptian army confirmed that “there is no form of cooperation with Israel.”
The Suez Canal is considered one of the most important canals and straits around the world. It is the shortest shipping route between Europe and Asia, and is considered one of the main sources of hard currency for Egypt.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi revealed, late last September, in a televised speech that his country had lost about $6 billion in Suez Canal revenues, due to geopolitical tensions in the region.
This is in reference to the escalation of tensions in the southern Red Sea due to the Houthis targeting ships as part of what it says is support for Gaza that will stop if the Israeli war of annihilation that has been raging against it since October 7, 2023 is stopped.
In “solidarity with Gaza,” which is facing an Israeli war with American support, the Houthis targeted, with missiles and drones, Israeli cargo ships or those linked to them in the Red Sea, and the scope of targeting later expanded to include the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean, all the way to the Mediterranean Sea.
Since the beginning of this year, a Washington-led coalition has been launching raids that it says target “Houthi sites” in various regions of Yemen, in response to their attacks in the Red Sea, which was met with a response from the group from time to time.