Sinai bus crash
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The 2006 Sinai bus crash took place on 23 August 2006 when 11 Israeli tourists in the Sinai Peninsula were killed when their chartered bus overturned and landed upside down between Nuweiba and Taba. The surviving victims say that the driver intentionally crashed the bus in the context of an anti-Israeli terrorist attack.
The Egyptian driver was convicted of negligence by an Egyptian court and sentenced to 1 year in prison. The passengers, mostly Arab Israelis, publicly attacked the Egyptian government for extensively delaying Israeli EMS at the nearby Taba Border Crossing, the delay in medical attention being blamed for at least one of the deaths, and accuse Egyptian authorities of deliberately handing the driver a lenient sentence and treating the victims' families in a deplorable way because they were from Israel, despite the 1979 Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty. The head of the local council of Kfar Manda, where three of the dead hail from, said that even the legal department of Egypt treats them as "non humans" because they're Israelis.
Based on evidence the victims collected in the months since the crash, they have gone on to claim that the driver premeditated an attack against any Israelis, Jewish or not. They believe that the initial plan was to kill Jews, but that the terrorist cell decided not to abort the plan when they discovered that the passengers were Arabs.
One of the survivors, whose newly married bride was among the dead, reported that "The entire ride, the driver was very nervous. The driver said to us: you got Jewish education, you are the trash of the Jews and that we are traitors. When we asked him to turn on the air condition, he refused, saying 'soon you will all be very cold'. After the bus overturned, he walked out, stepped into a car that was waiting for him, and disappeared".
The victims are submitting compensation claims to Israel’s Terror Victim Fund on the basis of these charges, but they say that for political convenience, the two governments classified the tragedy as an accident, a ruling they are disputing legally.[1][2]
