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Israel agreed to more than just a prisoner exchange to get woman back from Syria
“Last week, I raised in the Knesset a demand to allow the entrance of thousands of vaccines to Gaza and to provide vaccines to Palestinians in the West Bank from the large inventory that Israel has (which is the responsibility of an occupying force). Did I need to wait for a Jewish wo/man to cross into Gaza so that [Palestinians] could get a vaccine?” Tibi wrote. On Friday afternoon Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke with the young woman’s mother, who thanked him for the efforts to free her from captivity, according to a statement from the premier’s office. Netanyahu gave her his well-wishes and said Israel would always act to return captive citizens. On February 2, the Israeli woman crossed the border into Syria in the foothills of Mount Hermon, an area where there is minimal fencing and spotty surveillance camera coverage. It was not immediately clear how the 25-year-old woman, who reportedly speaks fluent Arabic, knew that this location was a good spot to cross. The military said it was investigating the incident. This was not the woman’s first time attempting to cross Israel’s borders. According to Israeli authorities, she had twice tried to enter the Gaza Strip — once by land and once on a makeshift raft — and once attempted to cross into Jordan. All three times she was captured by either the military or the police. After successfully crossing into Syria this month, she entered the Druze village of Khader, where she was captured on suspicion of being a spy and handed over to Syrian intelligence. Damascus told Russia of the matter, and Moscow passed along the information to Israel, prompting negotiations to get her back. “Roughly two weeks ago, we received information about an Israeli civilian woman being held by Syrian security forces. She crossed to the Syrian side of her own volition and by herself — an incident that we will be investigating,” Defense Minister Benny Gantz said in a video statement on Friday, after her return. “We immediately began working to bring her back. We clarified to the other side that she was a civilian and that this was a humanitarian issue and not a security one. We held conversations with the senior-most Russian officials, our counterparts. I spoke personally with the Russian defense minister, whom I’d like to thank for his involvement and for the assistance from the Russian government in the effort to return her home,” Gantz said. In addition to the classified aspect of the agreement, Israel initially agreed to concessions regarding two prisoners — Nihal al-Maqt and Dhiyab Qahmuz — both from the Druze community of the Golan Heights, who largely remained loyal to Damascus after the area was captured by Israel in 1967 and effectively annexed in 1981. As the incident unfolded, Russia had pushed for Israel to scale back its airstrikes on Iran-linked sites in Syria — ongoing attacks that both Damascus and Moscow oppose, the former because its air defenses are regularly targeted during these operations as they fire on Israeli jets and the latter because it interferes with Russian efforts to stabilize and rebuild the war-torn country. But this request appears to have been rejected, as evident by the Syrian reports of Israeli strikes in the country over the past two weeks. Al-Maqt had been imprisoned for incitement since 2017, and Qahmuz was sentenced to 16 years in prison in 2018 for plotting a terror bombing in coordination with the Lebanese Hezbollah terror group.
The exchange operation that began yesterday led to the two Syrian captives freed and returned to their hometown in the Quneitra province. Captive Nihal Al-Maqt, an Israeli girl from an ultra-Orthodox West Bank settlement who had mistakenly entered the Syrian territories in the Quneitra region and subsequently arrested by the Syrian authorities also set free as part of the same operation. Posted by: trailing wife 2021-02-20 |
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