Egyptian Finance Minister Samir Radwan has been quoted as saying that the 1979 Israel-Egypt peace treaty does not obligate his country to sell natural gas to the Jewish state.

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Syria or Spain.

Meanwhile, Jordan has begun looking for alternatives for the Egyptian gas following last week's attack on the gas pipeline in El-Arish. The kingdom's Energy Minister Khaled Touqan says his country has asked Iraq to increase its oil supplies from 10,000 barrels a day to 30,000.

According to Touqan, the Egyptian authorities told Jordan that the pipeline would be fixed within two weeks. Since the blast, the amount of gas supplied to Jordan from Egypt has gone down to half or one-third of the amount supplied before the blast (about 240 million cubic feet a day).

The Jordanian economy suffered greatly from previous attack on the pipeline on February 5, which led to a halt in the Egyptian gas flow, after it was forced to start using fuel oil. The damage was estimated at some $3 million a day.

Doron Peskin is head of research at Info-Prod Research (Middle East) Ltd.