BEIRUT – Bombardment by Israel was responsible for the deaths of two Israeli soldiers whose capture by Hizbullah began a war in 2006 and whose bodies were returned to Israel two years later, according to a Lebanese minister.
Hizbullah handed over the bodies of Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev in a prisoner exchange, but never said how they died.
Israeli officials have said they were badly wounded, one of them fatally, when they were captured by the Shia militant group in a cross-border raid in July 2006.
Lebanese health minister Ali Hassan Khalil, publishing his memoirs of the 34-day war between Hizbullah and Israel in Lebanon's al-Safirnewspaper, quoted a Hizbullah official as saying the two Israelis were killed by Israeli bombing.
“There is another subject which only a very few brothers know about, and which no one other than us will know about later,” he quoted Hussein al-Khalil as saying on August 3rd, 2006, roughly half way through the conflict. “Israeli bombardment in recent days led to the death of the two Israeli prisoners.”
He said the soldiers’ captors had taken every precaution to avoid them being killed, “but the expansion of the bombardment and the use of big rockets . . . led to this”.
The minister, who belongs to the Shia Amal movement which is allied to Hizbullah, quoted the official as saying: “It’s ironic, Israel kills the prisoners on whose behalf it declared war. From our part, we will continue the battle of negotiations as if nothing had happened.”
The Israeli army dismissed what it called “blatant fabrications” as psychological warfare. – (Reuters)