Tzvi Regev, father of Eldad Regev saying Kaddish by the coffin of his son. [Isranet photo]

The reality of the fate of IDF soldiers, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev was finally told on July 16.

The two soldiers were abducted across the Lebanon Israel border by Hezbollah guerillas on 12 July 2006.  It was always hoped that in any further prisoner exchange the two soldiers would be returned to Israel, alive.

Recently it became clear that the two men were dead, although this was not confirmed by Hezbollah right up to the time of the exchange at the border point of Rosh Hanikra earlier Wednesday. Examination of the bodies of the two men suggests that they were killed in the border skirmish that precipitated the Second Lebanon War.  

In exchange for the bodies of the two IDF soldiers Israel agreed to pardon terrorist Samir Kunter and three other gunmen who, in 1979, made their way south from Lebanon to Nahariya, five miles to the south of the border in a rubber dingy. A local policeman discovered the infiltrators and was himself killed in an ensuing gunfight.  Later Kunter and his cohorts burst into a local apartment and took Danny Haran and his four-year-old daughter hostage out of the apartment and down to the nearby beach where they were murdered in a very brutal manner which included crushing the head of the four-year old.  Kunter was returned to Lebanon today receiving a hero’s welcome by most of the Lebanese political leadership and Hezbollah who regard a man who crushed the skull of a four year old Jewish girl worthy of such adulation.
 
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi went to Rosh Hanikra to honor the memory of the returning IDF soldiers in a very moving ceremony.