The way retired Israeli general Arieh Biro tells the story doesn't leave much to the imagination. First, he says, the 49 Egyptian soldiers, taken prisoner by Israeli paratroopers in the 1956 war, were ordered to lie facedown on the ground. Next, Biro and a lieutenant raked their bodies with submachine gunfire. "They didn't cry out. They were in shock," Biro, then a captain, says without emotion. "It was all over in a couple of minutes."

Actually, it's not over yet. The disclosure that Israeli officers massacred Egyptian POWs in the 1956 war in the Sinai has generated similar allegations about the 1967 war and touched off a scandal that could reach Israel's leading political personalities. The controversy has prompted a bout of soul searching among a people who take pride in the morality of their army. The new paper Yediot Aharonot this week concluded that the government-ordered investigation was necessary not only to satisfy Egyptians but "for our own sake, our conscience, our beliefs and our principles."

The tempest began last month when the army declassified an official report containing an account of the 1956 slaughter in the Sinai by the 890th paratrooper battalion. Biro, who had been a company commander, stood up and took responsibility. By his account, his unit was ordered to move south and didn't have the means of taking the Egyptian captives along. Also, there was concern that the prisoners, if let go, would lead their advancing comrades to the Israeli troops. And so they were shot. Biro, now 69, told reporters he has "ached over" his actions but added, "under the same circumstances, I think I would do it again."

At the time, the 890th was commanded by Rafael Eitan, who is now leader of the ultranationalist political party Tsomet. Eitan, a former army chief of staff and Cabinet minister is a member of the Knesset and an announced candidate in the 1996 election for Prime Minister. Questioned about whether Eitan ordered the killings, Biro said last week, "Ask him." Eitan has not commented.

Biro warns that if he is "thrown to the wolves" over the killings, he will name those who shared responsibility, and "many important people will be implicated." Uri Avnery, a peace activist and former Knesset member, has filed complaints with the police and the Attorney General against Biro, Eitan and retired general Ariel Sharon, a prominent figure in the right-wing Likud Party who was the paratroopers' brigade commander at the time of the massacre. Biro has said he did not think Sharon, who arrived on the scene only the following day, could have known about the murders.

Biro's account unleashed other stories about the 1967 Six-Day War, in which Yitzhak Rabin, now the Labor Party Prime Minister, was chief of staff. Michael Bar-Zohar, a war veteran and former Labor Knesset member, told Israeli radio that he saw two army cooks use knives to slaughter three Egyptian POWs "in broad daylight." In a newspaper account, journalist Gabriel Brun, a sergeant major in 1967, wrote of seeing two military policemen force an Egyptian prisoner to dig his own grave, shoot him inside it, then shoot another prisoner who fell into the grave. Brun said he saw five Egyptians killed that way.

The most serious charge was leveled by Arieh Yitzhaki, a former archivist with the army's history branch. He alleges that in 1967, 300 to 400 Egyptian and Palestinian soldiers fleeing from the Gaza Strip toward Egypt were mowed down by Israel's Shaked reconnaissance unit. Some, he says, died fighting, but others were shot after surrendering. Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, Shaked's acting commander at the time and now Rabin's Housing Minister, denies any POW killings.

While the Egyptian government has formally asked Israel to investigate, its reaction to the disclosures has been remarkably muted. Neither country wants to rock the hard-earned relations the two have developed, especially when Israel, with Egypt's help, is trying to seal a peace deal with Syria and to expand its agreements with the Palestinians. Moreover, the Egyptians may be reluctant to fling open this closet. According to one Israeli account from the 1948 war, Egyptian troops murdered six Israeli soldiers, cut off their genitals and left the bodies propped up on sand dunes, their gouged-out eyes in their hands. Bar-Zohar says that in the 1973 war he saw the bodies of some 20 Israeli soldiers laid out in rows beside the Suez Canal, with bullet holes in the back of their necks.

The controversy is brewing at a time when Israelis are more and more willing to criticize their own part in the decades-long Arab-Israeli conflict. Sharon calls the current tendency toward self-blame "national suicide." While condemning the killing of POWs, he observes that "it is very hard now, sitting in deep armchairs in air-conditioned rooms, to understand circumstances in the battlefield during very difficult wars."

Avnery, on the other hand, sees the spate of war-crimes confessions and the general trend toward introspection as signs of health in Israeli society. "This is part of the process of demystification, of telling ourselves the truth about ourselves, and it is a sign of confidence," he says. Confidence, and perhaps some timely humility.

-With reporting by Eric Silver/Jerusalem