doIt was in the Middle East that, in November 1956, the United Nations (UN) first equipped its peacekeeping forces with blue helmets. It was about distinguishing the nearly six thousand soldiers in charge of guaranteeing the ceasefire, at the end of the offensive led by Israel, with the support of France and Great Britain, against Egypt.
Israel categorically rejected the deployment in its territory of this United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF), which had to content itself, in March 1957, with a position only on the Egyptian side of the Israeli-Egyptian border, as well as on the inside Gaza. Strip, home of its headquarters.
In May 1967, Cairo demanded the withdrawal of the UNEF, which caused an escalation with Israel that led, the following month, to the Six-Day War, with the Israeli reoccupation of the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula and the Strip. of Gaza (East Jerusalem). The West Bank and the Syrian Golan Heights were also occupied at the end of this conflict).
A supposed provisional force
This first experience of a UN peacekeeping force in the Middle East ended in an even more painful failure since fourteen Indian peacekeepers were killed in June 1967 in the Israeli bombardment of Gaza. It took seven years for the UN to again involve its peacekeepers in the region, this time after it abandoned the October 1973 war between Israel, on the one hand, and Egypt and Syria, on the other.
In fact, a UNEF II was created to monitor the ceasefire between Israel and Egypt, before a United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDF) was created in May 1974 with a comparable mission on the Syrian front. . Unlike the initial UNEF, these two peacekeeping forces were not deployed on the international border, but in territory still occupied by Israel, which had agreed to a limited withdrawal rather than an effective withdrawal. The UNEF 2 mandate ended in March 1979 with the signing of the peace treaty, under the auspices of the United States, between Israel and Egypt, which progressively recovered, over the next three years, the entire peninsula. of Sinai.
The UNDFD, on the other hand, is still deployed, after half a century, with a thousand blue helmets under Nepalese command. Hafez Al-Assad, master of Syria from 1970 to 2000, and then his son and successor Bashar, wanted to maintain calm on the Golan front, despite the annexation, in December 1981, of this Syrian territory by Israel. .
You have 55.29% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
