Egyptian students protest against Israel's killing of policemen

Thousands of students rallied across Egypt Sunday in the third straight day of protests over Israel's accidental killing of three Egyptian policemen on the Gaza border.

An official said Egypt and Israel were still negotiating on a new date for Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit's trip to Israel. The trip would set the stage for the first high-level Arab-Israeli meeting since Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's death, and had been expected Wednesday. It was postponed without explanation until sometime next month after Thursday's border shooting.

"No date has been set yet," Foreign Ministry spokesman Ahmed Izzat told The Associated Press by telephone Sunday, declining to say when a decision would be made.

Approximately 10,000 students across Egypt demonstrated on Sunday. Some called on their government to officially reject Israel's apology for the shooting and to "open the door for the people [to wage] holy war against Israel."

"Down, down with Israel! Down, down with America!" shouted protestors at Cairo University, who also called for the severing of Egypt's diplomatic ties with Israel and the United States.

Approximately 4,000 protestors rallied at Ain Shams University near Cairo and another 3,000 met at Tanta University in Northern Egypt.

The Egyptian parliament's foreign relations committee, in an emergency meeting late Saturday, rejected Israel's apology over the border shooting, saying it was "not enough for such reckless act." Also Saturday, more than 2,000 students demonstrated at Alexandria University. At a protest at Cairo's main mosque on Friday, demonstrators held a banner reading: "The pigs' apology doesn't quench our rage."

Egypt tells Israel to pick more disciplined troopsEgypt has told Israel it must choose more disciplined troops, Egypt's official Middle East News Agency reported on Sunday.

Aboul Gheit also told his Israeli counterpart Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom that Egypt "would absolutely not accept the repetition of this type of incident".

"Israeli leaders and soldiers with a greater degree of discipline must be picked so that they don't open fire randomly and hit others, leading to the complication of relations with Egypt," Aboul Gheit told Shalom in a phone call.

Aboul Gheit said the way Israel Defense Forces troops act on the border and in the occupied Palestinian territories indicated that "the fingers of those Israeli soldiers on the Egyptian border are on the trigger ... therefore I was expecting this kind of incident".

Egyptian media responses to the border incident were highly critical.

Opposition newspapers published anti-Israel articles over the weekend while official papers included wide coverage of the funerals of the three policemen killed by Israeli tank fire.

It is perhaps due to articles that appeared over the weekend in the Egyptian press that Gheit chose to release in a public forum Sunday statements he had made last Friday to Shalom.

Egypt has in the past criticized what it says are heavy-handed Israeli military tactics against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip over the last four years.

IDF Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Moshe Ya'alon apologized to Egypt on Friday for the killing of the policemen the day before and said his troops had mistaken them for Palestinian militants.

	Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit (AP/Archive)