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News ID: 71205
Publish Date : 02 October 2019 - 22:17

Zionist Regime to Increase Gas Exports to Egypt

CAIRO (Dispatches) – The Zionist regime is significantly increasing the amount of natural gas it plans to export to Egypt under a deal, the occupying regime’s energy companies said on Wednesday.
Partners in Israel’s Leviathan and Tamar offshore gas fields agreed last year to sell $15 billion worth of gas to a customer in Egypt in what regime officials called "the most significant deal to emerge since the neighbors made peace in 1979.”
The amended agreement sees a 34% increase in exports to about 85 billion cubic meters (bcm). One source in the regime’s energy industry estimated the value of gas was now $19.5 billion - $14 billion coming from Leviathan and $5.5 billion from Tamar.
Zionist regime looks at Jordan and Egypt as the potential buyers of gas which it claims to have found in the eastern Mediterranean. Egypt's trade with Israel is larger than its trade with some Arab countries.
The reserves, discovered in the eastern Mediterranean Levant Basin since 2009, straddle the territories of several countries - including Cyprus, Greece, Egypt, Lebanon and Syria - whose relations are strained on a number of fronts.
Lebanon has warned its Mediterranean neighbors that a planned gas pipeline from Israel to the European Union must not be allowed to violate its maritime borders.
Beirut has an unresolved maritime border dispute with Israel over a sea area of about 860 sq km extending along the edge of three of Lebanon’s southern energy blocks.
Israel is hoping to enlist several European countries in the construction of a 2,000 km pipeline linking vast eastern Mediterranean gas resources to Europe through Cyprus, Greece and Italy at a cost of $7 billion.
Lebanese Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri said in February that the regime was seeking to steal Lebanon’s oil and gas reserves.
Before 2012, Israel imported natural gas from Egypt; though the pipeline, running through the restive Sinai Peninsula, was dogged by frequent attacks.
The sale of gas to Israel, which signed a peace treaty with Egypt in 1979 after four wars, was always controversial in the Arab world’s most populous country.
The deal, initially slated to last 20 years, was finally canceled by Egyptian authorities following the 2012 ouster of president Hosni Mubarak.
The cancellation put the official stamp on the end of the bilateral gas deal. Several senior petroleum officials under Mubarak, including his oil minister Sameh Fahmy, were also sentenced to between three and 15 years in jail for selling natural gas at below-market prices.