Word: suez
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...Over the Suez Canal one day last week, Israeli pilots angled in to shoot up Egyptian positions in what has become an almost daily operation. When the Egyptians retaliated by sending planes across the canal, Israeli antiaircraft gunners shot down one plane and an Israeli pilot bagged another. The two represented the 59th and 60th Israeli kills of Egyptian aircraft since the Six-Day War in 1967, against claimed Israeli losses on the Egyptian front of only eight of their own planes...
Neither revelry nor formal ceremonies will mark the canal's 100th anniversary. The silence along its banks will be broken only by the whine of bullets and the scream of attacking jets. Closed since the outbreak of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, Suez today is a useless relic of what was once one of the world's busiest waterways that handled an average of 57 ships a day in 1966. Dug in on opposite banks, the Arabs and Israelis sometimes slip across the canal to launch raids. The canal thus even fails to fulfill its sole remaining function...
Today the only ships in the canal are 15 vessels, which have been trapped in the Suez ever since the fighting broke out 30 months ago. One, the American freighter Observer, sits alone in Lake Timsah, 49 miles south of Port Said. The 14 others are bunched together in the Great Bitter Lake. Skeleton crews, who are rotated every three months, maintain the vessels...
...loss of the canal, shippers have turned to using huge supertankers of 200,000 tons and more, and to sending cargo from Asia to Europe via Seattle overland to New York. Egypt and Israel are building pipelines to pump Middle East oil to Mediterranean ports. Though a reopened Suez might have a diminished role in world trade, it would still be very busy. Freighters, liners and warships making up 80% of the world's tonnage could travel it fully loaded, as could tankers up to 70,000 tons. Even supertankers, whose fully loaded hulls are too deep...
Beyond the task of raising two sunken ships and a downed bridge, there are few physical barriers to reopening Suez. Most experts agree that the removal and dredging operations could be completed within six months at a cost of $30 million and would restore the canal to its prewar depth. The task, however, will be painstaking and delicate. The engineers must make certain that any unexploded bombs or artillery shells that fell in the canal are fished out before the world's ships pass once more through Suez. One problem that does not worry engineers is silting, since...