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Defense Minister Ehud Barak (Guy Ravitz / Archive)
Last update - 23:49 08/07/2008
Barak: Israel won't tolerate Hezbollah truce violations
By Jack Khoury, Tomer Zarchin, Amos Harel, Barak Ravid and Yuval Azoulay, Haaretz Correspondents and News Agencies
Tags: hezbollah, israel 

Defense Minister Ehud Barak on Tuesday warned that Israel will not tolerate violations of a two-year-old cease-fire by the Lebanon-based Hezbollah guerrilla organization.

Barak's comments came just a day after Israel and Hezbollah signed a prisoner exchange agreement for the return of kidnapped Israel Defense Forces soldiers Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev.

The kidnapping of the two IDF soldiers by Hezbollah guerillas in July 2006 sparked the Second Lebanon War, which was ended when both Israel and Hezbollah agreed to a cease-fire.
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The defense minister issued the warning in a phone call to the French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, according to a statement late Tuesday from Barak's office.

Also Tuesday, Army Radio reported that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is summoning the Security Cabinet on Wednesday to discuss Hezbollah violations.

The statement quoted Barak as saying, Israel cannot accept the continuing and increasing erosion of the truce. It lists arms supplies from Syria and demands that the United Nations force take action to stop it.

Court rejects appeal against Kuntar release as part of swap

The High Court on Tuesday rejected a petition against the release of jailed Lebanese terrorist Samir Kuntar as part of the prisoner exchange deal with Hezbollah.

Kuntar was convicted in 1979 for killing policeman Eliyahu Shahar and three members of the Haran family in a 1979 terror attack.

The petition was submitted on Monday by Yoram and Simha Shahar - the brother and sister of Eliyahu Shahar - as well as Dr. Aryeh Bachrach, whose son Ohad was murdered by terrorists in Wadi Kelt in 1995, in addition to the Almagor Terror Victims' Association.

Before the court hearing on Monday, Simcha Shahar said of Kuntar that, "This is a mass murderer whom it is impossible to give a prize and free him even after 30 years."

Keren Shahar, who was three years old when her father, Eliyahu Shahar, was murdered, said the likelihood that Goldwasser and Regev are dead should compel the state to think twice about going ahead with the swap.

"If one of the soldiers is certain to be alive, we would agree, but all the officials in charge note that both soldiers are not alive," she said. "So they should swap dead bodies in exchange for dead bodies. I can't see the person who turned me into an orphan at age three go free and return to his family and his mother."

In addition to news of the deal having been signed breaking on Monday, it also emerged that IDF soldiers have begun digging up the bodies of Lebanese combatants to be exchanged in the deal.

Ofer Dekel, Israel's chief negotiator for securing the release of abducted soldiers, signed the deal on Sunday after meeting in Europe with the German mediator charged by the UN with brokering the exchange, Gerhard Konrad.

"The continuation of the deal's implementation is conditional upon the existence of a few more components," a bureau spokesperson said, without explicitly stating what those components were.

Israel is expected to release Lebanese prisoners and Hezbollah will hand over two missing IDF soldiers in the exchange. Hezbollah kidnapped the soldiers - reservists Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev - during a cross-border raid that triggered the 2006 Second Lebanon War. Hezbollah has given no word on the soldiers' condition, although they are widely presumed dead. Olmert declared Goldwasser and Regev dead before the cabinet approved the deal, but Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who has not allowed Red Cross visits or given any sign that the two are alive, called that declaration "speculation."

The exchange is expected to take place in the next 10 days to two weeks.

The Prime Minister's Bureau statement also noted that Israel has still not received the final report on the fate of missing Israel Air Force navigator Ron Arad that Hezbollah pledged to hand over. The report is supposed to detail efforts Hezbollah made to find out what happened to Arad after his plane crashed in Lebanon in 1986.

In any case it seems the final report on Arad will not influence the cabinet decision to proceed with the swap.

Dekel traveled to Europe Monday to receive the report.

The army confirmed Monday that the process of exhuming bodies has begun at the Amiad cemetery for enemy combatants, which has been declared a closed military zone to prevent reporters from witnessing the process.

Israel will also hand over the bodies of some 200 Arabs killed while infiltrating northern Israel, and Hezbollah will return body parts of Israeli soldiers killed in south Lebanon in 2006.

While Israeli officials refused to say whose bodies would be transfered to Lebanon, according to Palestinian sources the dead include Palestinian and Lebanese guerrillas killed in decades of conflict with Israel, and the bodies of eight Hezbollah fighters. The dead may include the perpetrators of the attacks in Ma'alot in 1974, on the Coastal Road in 1978, and near kibbutz Matzuba in 2002; and bodies of Lebanese and Palestinians killed during the 1978 Litani campaign and 1982 Lebanon War.

In exchange for the report on Arad, Israel is to provide information on four Iranian diplomats who disappeared in Lebanon in 1982. Iran claims they were kidnapped by Lebanese militiamen allied with Israel, who delivered them to Israeli troops. Israel has long denied holding the four, and Samir Geagea, former head of the disbanded Lebanese Forces, has said that militiamen killed them.

The next stage of the deal would come in another three weeks, after the cabinet determines the number of prisoners to be releaed and their identities.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak met in his Tel Aviv office Monday afternoon with the team he established to examine the principles involved in dealing with kidnapped and missing soldiers. The group, headed by former Supreme Court President Meir Shamgar, will formulate policy for the state's handling of issues relating to such missing and captive soldiers.



Related articles:
  • Israel set to exhume bodies of Hezbollah fighters ahead of swap
  • Hezbollah expected to report Arad died in Lebanon over a decade ago
  • Despite Hezbollah report, the Ron Arad story is not over
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