Missing in Sinai: Egypt’s forgotten soldiers of 1967
One summer day, in the stillness of desert mid-Sinai, a man stopped his car on a dirt track some three kms west of Al-Hasana city. The land around him was uninhabited, quiet but for the wind that scoured the sand. The man, who worked for the Sinai Foundation for Human Rights/SFHR had paused to stretch his legs when something half-buried caught his eye.
It was part of a military uniform, faded and brittle. Gently, he tugged on the fabric. What came up was more than just cloth: it was a body—bones clad in a soldier’s gear, wallet still in his pocket, photographs inside. A life paused in the act of vanishing, now rising again through the sand.
SFHR posted the find on Facebook and X with a plea: “Help us find his family and ensure a proper burial.” The man’s name according to the ID card nestled in the wallet was Fawzy Mohamed Abdel Mawla, born in 1945, once a private in the Egyptian army. He had gone to war and never returned. Until now.
SFHR speculated the soldier may have fallen during the Six-Day War of June 1967 and was hastily buried where he died, his name and story lost to time. The foundation appealed for help tracing his relatives, hoping to grant him recognition and the dignity of a proper burial.
A Face in the sand
“When I saw the photos, I knew immediately—it was my uncle Fawzy,” said Mohamed Abdel Mawla, a Cairo resident who stumbled upon the post by chance. “My father always told me about him.”
The soldier’s remains had been preserved astonishingly well, considering they had lain in the ground for nearly 60 years. “His body was just 15 centimeters beneath the surface,” said Ahmed Salem, executive director of SFHR. “It’s not uncommon. Locals say that during the 1967 war, Israeli soldiers would search for Egyptian troops. If they found one, they shot him in the head—twice—and left the body behind.”
Fawzy’s personal belongings formed a kind of time capsule. A worn wallet revealed a civilian ID listing his hometown as Wadi Al-Qamar, a working-class neighborhood near Alexandria. His military ID confirmed his rank as “private” while a vaccination record from 1966 listed doses for typhoid, cholera, and smallpox. There were snapshots of men in uniform, smiling in the sun, scribbled with affectionate notes. There was a business card from a carpenter on Tahrir Street in Cairo—perhaps a friend, or maybe someone he had planned to see after the war.
He never got that chance.
The name we carried
To trace the soldier’s family, Al Manassa searched Facebook for possible relatives, eventually connecting with Mohamed Mahmoud Abdel Mawla, Fawzy’s nephew, who recognized his uncle from the photos shared online.
In the village of Wadi Al-Qamar, Fawzy’s name had long hovered in family memory like a ghost no one could lay to rest. He was a laborer, his nephew who was born four years after his death told Al Manassa. “My father and the elders in our village always spoke of Fawzy’s bravery. He was known for his loyalty.”
Fawzy had fought in Yemen before being redeployed to Sinai in the tense weeks leading up to the 1967 war.
“After that, nothing,” said Mohamed. “No letter, no word. Just silence.”
That silence had become part of the family’s rhythm, a name whispered in stories but absent from the dinner table, from holidays, from mourning rituals. His brother—Mohamed's father—never stopped speaking of him, but no grave was ever visited.
Now, after decades of wondering, the family had a chance to bring him home.
The long road to recognition
SFHR notified the Ministry of Defense, requesting a proper burial of Fawzy’s remains. When Mohamed contacted them, they urged him to make an official request to the military. He did—traveling first to the Northern Military Region’s headquarters in Alexandria, then later to the General Secretariat of the Armed Forces in Cairo, submitting documents and photographs and enduring long waits and bureaucratic silences.
But he was persistent, “A soldier like him deserves to be honored,” he said. “He gave his life for his homeland and his people.”
Finally, in September 2024, the military agreed to repatriate the remains. DNA tests confirmed the identity. Fawzy’s body, now properly accounted for, was transferred to Suez Military Hospital, where officers of the Third Field Army presided over a ceremony decades overdue.
Afterward, a procession carried him north. At Senani Mosque in Alexandria’s Dekheila district, family and neighbors gathered in prayer. From there, the final leg led to the family cemetery in Wadi Al-Qamar—his hometown, the place where his name had lingered all those years.
“I couldn’t sleep from happiness,” Mohamed said. “We can finally lay the martyr to rest. We know where he is now.”
Bones beneath the surface
The spot where Fawzy was found is known locally as Tabbat al-Madhbah/Butchery Hill, a name steeped in memory and grief. According to SFHR reports and accounts passed down by elders, this area witnessed a massacre of Egyptian soldiers by Israeli forces during the chaos of Egypt’s retreat in 1967.
It’s not the only site. In 2008, farmers near Sheikh Zuweid unearthed a mass grave while preparing a plot for cultivation. Dozens of skeletons in uniform. Witnesses then estimated at least 120 bodies. The story made headlines in Al-Masry Al-Youm but was quickly forgotten.
“The elders say they would find bones often, and when they did, they prayed over them and buried them again,” said Salem.
These stories echo a national silence. While the state periodically reopens files on war crimes against Egyptian prisoners during the 1967 war, little has come of the investigations. Revelations have surfaced—some from Israeli sources, others from local testimonies—but accountability remains elusive.
According to Lt. Gen. Mohamed Fawzy, Egypt’s chief of staff during the war, 13,600 soldiers were unaccounted for in the aftermath. Through the International Red Cross, 3,799 were confirmed as prisoners and exchanged for 219 Israelis in 1968. The remaining 9,800 were presumed missing until 1971, when they were officially declared martyrs.
These official records lend painful weight to international estimates, which place the number of Egyptian soldiers killed or missing between 9,000 and 15,000—an enduring national trauma compounded by unanswered questions and unrecovered remains.
In 2022, reports in Yedioth Ahronoth and Haaretz revealed that dozens of Egyptian soldiers were burned alive and buried in an unmarked grave under what is now an Israeli tourist attraction, the Mini Israel park near Kibbutz Nahshon, between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. The investigations were based on archival records and witness interviews.
After these revelations, Egypt formally requested a full and transparent investigation. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs instructed its embassy in Tel Aviv to urge Israeli authorities to verify the information and provide a detailed report. However, to date, no findings were made public.
Fifteen years earlier, a similar outcry followed the Israeli broadcast of “Spirit of Shaked”, a documentary that follows the Israeli army’s elite Shaked battalion from 1950, including a segment on the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. The segment implied that the Israeli battalion executed 250 Egyptian prisoners.
Egypt demanded that Israel conduct an urgent investigation and punish the perpetrators, warning it would otherwise escalate the matter internationally and pursue the perpetrators as war criminals. Then, again, the investigation went nowhere.
Memory of the sand
The desert keeps its secrets until wind, chance, or the hand of a wandering man pulls them loose.
Fawzy Abdel Mawla lay beneath the sand for more than half a century. His body bore witness to a war that reshaped the region, to a war crime still denied, still unresolved. But now, he is no longer missing, no longer a mystery.
The desert gave him up. And with him, perhaps, a chance to reckon with what else lies beneath—not only in the sands of Sinai, but in the archives. The rights of martyrs like Fawzy are not merely about burial or remembrance; they demand truth, recognition, and justice. Accountability has yet to be delivered, and until the full story is told, these soldiers remain casualties not only of war, but of neglect.
(*) An Arabic version of this article first appeared on July 9, 2024