“We have a wide range of cooperation with the Israelis,” Mr. Sisi said, according to the statement.
A spokesman for CBS News said that shortly after the interview was recorded, its producers had received a phone call from the Egyptian Embassy requesting that it be withheld from broadcast. At the instructions of the ambassador, “we are formally requesting that the interview not be aired,” an Egyptian diplomat wrote in a follow-up email, according to the CBS spokesman, Kevin Tedesco.
CBS is now promoting the interview as “the interview Egypt’s government doesn’t want on TV.” The government’s specific objection was not made explicit.
The Egyptian Embassy did not respond to a request for comment.
The insurgency in the North Sinai began in 2013, when Mr. Sisi, then the defense minister, removed Egypt’s first fairly elected president, Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Egyptian and Western officials have said that the militants based in the North Sinai number less than a few thousand. But the Egyptian military has struggled for five years without success to crush them. Since 2015 the militants have declared themselves an arm of the Islamic State.
American officials have said that the covert Israeli air campaign began around the same time and has played a pivotal role in helping the Egyptian Army regain the upper hand against the insurgents.
Mr. Sisi, in the same interview, also made inaccurate assertions in an effort to justify the massacre by Egyptian security forces of nearly 1,000 people in August 2013 at a sit-in protesting his military takeover.
“There were thousands of armed people in the sit-in for more than 40 days,” Mr. Sisi said, according to the CBS statement. “We tried every peaceful means to disperse them.”
In fact, Egyptian officials have acknowledged that they recovered only a handful of weapons from the sit-in, and human rights groups who have studied the massacre have affirmed the conclusion of journalists present that very few demonstrators were armed.
Source : Nytimes
