Word: aqaba
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Several hundred miles to the southeast, the British began evacuating Jordan. After embarking six shiploads of troops at Jordan's Red Sea port of Aqaba, the British started a final airlift of 2,000 men to Cyprus. To do so, they had to overfly Nasser's Syria. But with Nasser's consent, Norway's General Odd Bull posted U.N. supervisory teams at Syrian airport control towers for the estimated five days the airlift would take...
Four U.S. engineers arrived to try to improve Jordan's incredible desert railroads (of 21 locomotives, only five are operable) and to devise a method of speeding up the unloading of cargo at the shallow-draft port of Aqaba. For the British, who are holding the lid tight on this boiling cauldron, the situation is becoming critical. Each possible move seems to create more problems than it solves...
...East Africa and Asia while bypassing Nasser's Suez Canal. Invading Israeli armies, routing the Egyptians from the Sinai peninsula, spiked the Egyptian guns placed to menace any vessel seeking entrance from the Red Sea through the narrow, four-mile-wide Strait of Tiran into the Gulf of Aqaba and thence to Elath. Now the U.N. Emergency Force guards the strait and permits Israel "innocent passage" into the gulf, while Arab nations protest but do not intervene...
...north to Taba in the south, there has scarcely been a single incident of importance since UNEF troops moved into position. Discreetly, Hammarskjold did not go to Sharm el Sheikh, where Egyptian guns for more than six years barred entry of Israeli ships to the Gulf of Aqaba. Today UNEF soldiers watch as some six vessels a month push up the gulf to unload in the small Israeli port of Elath. But neither the Israelis (who are grateful) nor the Arabs (who do nothing to prevent the traffic) are anxious to call attention to the situation...
Gifts for Arabs. Across the Strait of Tiran, the Saudi Arabians have dug gun emplacements but show no evidence of using them. Back in Cairo, Colonel Nasser accepts the presence of UNEF as a reason for not interfering with Israeli vessels in the Gulf of Aqaba and thereby inviting another encounter with the Israeli army. Israel, at present, does not recognize the 1949 armistice agreement with Egypt, and still refuses to permit UNEF troops on its side of the border. But Israeli kibbutzim fraternize with the polyglot army, and Israel's government station broadcasts regularly in Swedish, Portuguese...