An Israeli delegation arrived in New York Monday to view a videotape made by UN peacekeepers after Hizbollah captured three Israeli soldiers. Meanwhile, a Lebanese group is pressing the government to secure freedom for 18 nationals in Israeli jails.
UN spokesman Fred Eckhard was quoted by AFP as saying that the Israeli delegation, led by an army general, Dany Arditi, had conferred with senior officials in the department of peacekeeping operations and were expected to watch the video on Tuesday morning.
The delegation included two other Israeli army officers whose rank was not disclosed, but no relatives of the soldiers captured by Hizbollah resistance fighters in the occupied Shabaa farms.
The experts hope items recovered from the scene and the UN videotapes will shed some light on the fate of the soldiers, after a UN report said last week that the three were seriously wounded or dead.
Eckhard confirmed reports from Jerusalem that UN Secretary General Kofi Annan had spoken to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon about the United Nations' handling of the video, which prompted an internal inquiry last month.
Israeli radio said that during their telephone conversation on Sunday night, Sharon reportedly demanded that the UN "immediately" hand over all information it had relating to the abduction of the soldiers on October 7.
"The secretary general expressed the hope that, once the Israeli team had come here and viewed the tape, the issue would be put behind us," Eckhard said.
Annan reportedly apologized to Sharon over the way his organization handled the issue.
According to Haaretz, “the UN admitted on Friday it had - unintentionally - misled Israel concerning the reports and videotapes from the south Lebanon border scene” where Hizbollah captured the occupation soldiers.
The UN launched a probe into the affair last month, after images from a tape recorded by UNIFIL peacekeeping troops 18 hours after the kidnappings were broadcast on Israeli television. The UN had denied that any tape existed relating to the soldiers' capture.
It was revealed that there are three tapes in UN hands - one filmed by an Indian peacekeeper on October 8; a second one recently discovered at UN headquarters that shows artillery fire and "smoke that could be from the burning Israeli jeep" but not of the operation itself, according to the report; and a third tape taken from a July Lebanese television bulletin that purported to show photographs of Hizbollah during the incident itself.
While the UN was preoccupied with the three soldiers captured by a resistance group in an occupied Arab land, Lebanese activists gathered to push their government to do something about 18 of their their compatriots detained by Israel.
The head of a detainees support committee on Monday described as "regrettable" the lack of attention paid by the government to securing the release of the 18 Lebanese prisoners, according to the Daily Star.
"The government isn't taking up the issue seriously," said Mohammed Safa, the head of the Follow-up Committee for the Support of Lebanese Detainees in Israeli Prisons. "There's no official government move to help the detainees."
His comments came as around 50 families and supporters of the Israeli POWs held a noisy protest in Tel Aviv outside the office of the International Committee for the Red Cross.
Tempers flared when Haim Abraham, father of abducted soldier Benny Abraham, shouted at a Red Cross official, who urged him to remain calm.
"I want to talk to somebody to let me know what happened to my child after 10 months," Abraham shouted. "Why you are not doing your job? Why you are not accessing to our children. Why? Why? Because we are Jewish?"
In the past 10 months, the parents of the three Israeli captives have visited New York, Washington and Paris as part of a tour sponsored by the Israeli government to drum up support for the return of the soldiers, the activists say.
The parents have won the sympathy of the United States Congress, which recently voted to cut the US contribution to UNIFIL by 50 percent if the UN failed to hand over to Israel an unedited version of the videotape.
The US Congress also demanded in May that the Red Cross be permitted to visit the three soldiers and another Israeli captured by Hizbollah.
Safa told the paper that amid all the concern from the international community over the Israeli captives, the 18 Lebanese detainees, including one who has spent 22 years in prison, have been ignored and forgotten.
"The Lebanese embassies don't even know the names of the detainees, nor how many there are," he said.
"If the government had any self-respect, it would have made a far greater effort to resolve this tragedy," he added.
Safa said that collectively, the 18 prisoners had spent more than 140 years in Israeli custody.
Among them is Samir Qantar of Abey in the Chouf. Qantar, 41, has spent more than half his life behind bars since being captured in 1979.
But he still has another 520 years to go before he can expect to be released. Qantar was sentenced for his role in an abortive attempt to kidnap Israelis in northern Israel in 1979. He received 99 years for each of the five Israelis killed during the operation and an additional 47 years for striking an Israeli officer during his interrogation.
Mustafa Hammoud, 31, was kidnapped from his home in the then-occupied village of Markaba in 1988, and accused of leading a resistance operation earlier that same day. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Anwar Yassin was 18 and about to begin a second year of training to be a computer programmer when he was captured during a resistance operation near Mount Hermon. He is serving a 30-year sentence in Israel's Ayalon Prison.
Hassan Ankoni, 30, was wounded in the foot and captured during a 1988 gun battle with Israeli troops in Meidoun, a ruined village on the edge of the occupation zone. His wife, Leila, claims that Ankoni was not treated for his wound and as a result is partially crippled. He has four years left to serve of his 18-year sentence.
The most famous Lebanese detainees are Mustafa Dirani, the head of the Believers Resistance, and Sheikh Abdel-Karim Obeid, a senior Hizbollah cleric. Both were kidnapped from their homes by Israeli troops; Dirani in 1994 and Obeid in 1989.
Israel hopes to use them as bargaining chips in exchange for information on Ron Arad, an Israeli airman missing in Lebanon since 1986. They are being held in what Israel calls "administrative detention," a policy condemned by human rights groups under which detainees are imprisoned without charge or trial for renewable six-month periods.
Their Israeli lawyer, Zvi Rish, was quoted by the daily as saying that neither detainee has ever been allowed visits by Red Cross representatives, according to the paper.
The paper added that in the wake of the capture of the soldiers, a senior Western diplomat in Beirut suggested that Israel had received a dose of its own medicine: Israel "should have dumped Obeid, Dirani and the rest of them on the border when they pulled out."
Rish told an Israeli court as much in March when attempting to block another extension of Dirani and Obeid's detention.
If the two Lebanese had been released, he said, "the three Israeli soldiers would not have been abducted. It was so clear. The writing was on the wall."
But in April, the court ordered Obeid and Dirani to be detained for a further six months after Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer ruled out their release.
Hizbollah wants to use the three prisoners, and a fourth Israeli said to be a top Mossad agent operating in Lebanon, to free all Lebanese, Palestinian and Arab prisoners in Israel. Palestinian prisoners were estimated at around 1,600 at the beginning of the Intifada – Albawaba.com
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
