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Israel and Hezbollah 'prisoner' exchange
Even after the bodies of the two Israeli soldiers, Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser, had been handed over to Israel and examined by Red Cross officials yesterday, their parents clung to the hope that a mistake had been made, and that their sons would yet walk back across the border. "We will continue to hope until we can hope no more," said Tzvi Regev, the father of Sergeant Regev.The faint chance that at least one of the soldiers would be returned alive two years after they were captured by Hezbollah guerrillas pushed Israel to pay a high price for the exchange. Five Hezbollah prisoners were set free for the remains of the two soldiers, the most notorious among them Samir Qantar, who spent almost 30 years in an Israeli prison for the killing of an Israeli father and his young daughter. Israel also returned the bodies of nearly 200 Palestinian and Lebanese militants that had been killed in clashes over the past decades. Only hours after the exchange would the Regev family acknowledge that there was no more room for hope. Israeli forensic science teams confirmed what the Red Cross had already determined - that two black coffins handed over by the militant Shia group contained the corpses of Goldwasser and Regev. The kidnaps of the two soldiers set off a 34-day war between Lebanon and Israel in 2006. "It was horrible to see it," said Mr Regev, choking back tears as he described watching one of the coffins being removed from the Red Cross vehicle that had brought the remains back across the border. "We were always hoping that [Ehud] and Eldad were alive and that they would come home and we would hug them." A Regev family member added that it was impossible to watch celebrations being prepared across Lebanon, as the family readied for a funeral. In contrast to the festivities in Lebanon, a sombre mood enveloped much of Israel. Nowhere was the gravity of the day felt stronger than in the small coastal town of Nahariya, where the home of the Goldwasser family stands a few minutes' drive from the apartment building where Mr Qantar killed Danny Haran and his daughter, aged 4. The killing was for ever seared into the nation's consciousness as one of the most brutal acts of terrorism in Israel's history. In Mr Qantar's trial witnesses recalled how in the dead of night on April 22, 1979, he shot Mr Haran in front of his child, then killed the girl by smashing her skull against a rock with his rifle butt. Mr Haran's wife, Smadar, accidentally smothered her two-year-old daughter with her hand while trying to stifle her cries as she hid from the killer. He has never expressed remorse over the incident. Israel had hitherto held Mr Qantar as a bargaining chip to win new information about Ron Arad, an Israeli airman whose plane crashed in Lebanon in 1986. Under pressure from the captured soldiers' families to bring them home, Israel's Cabinet voted on Tuesday to release him in exchange for the bodies of the two captured soldiers. Posted by: Fred 2008-07-17 |
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