INTERNATIONAL LAW: Innocent Passage

The one tangible advantage Israel got out of the Sinai invasion was to open up its now bustling southernmost port of Elath to the sea, so that its ships could trade with 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,...

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