- Title: ISRAEL: Israel buries soldiers after swap with Hezbollah
- Date: 18th July 2008
- Summary: (W3)KIRYAT MOTSKIN, ISRAEL (JULY 17, 2008) (REUTERS) EXTERIOR OF REGEV FAMILY HOUSE OBITUARY ON HOUSE DOOR HUNDREDS OF CANDLES LIT ON ENTRANCE FLOOR SOLDIERS SITTING BY COFFIN IN VEHICLE VARIOUS OF CONVOY LEAVING FOR CEMETERY
- Embargoed: 2nd August 2008 13:00
- Keywords:
- Location: Israel
- Country: Israel
- Topics: Defence / Military
- Reuters ID: LVA4M27TFZAJGCYFSPW5IZYXAGG
- Story Text: Thousands attend funerals for Israeli reserve soldiers who were killed by Hezbollah in a cross-border raid in 2006, after their bodies were returned to the Jewish state in a swap deal with the Lebanese guerilla group.
Thousands attended Israeli funerals held on Thursday (July 17) for two slain soldiers returned in a prisoner swap with Hezbollah, sombre mourning that contrasted with Lebanon's joy over guerrillas freed in the deal.
Defence Minister Ehud Barak told the soldiers and civilians gathered by the gravesite of Ehud Goldwasser, 31, that Israel was "heartbroken"
and had "paid a heavy price" to bring home the bodies by freeing five guerrillas involved in lethal attacks.
"We have dreamt, all of us, the families and the state of Israel, to embrace Udi (Ehud Goldwasser) and Eldad (Regev), to embrace them with warmth, to put on a smile on their faces and our faces after two sad years. We wanted to see them, the Goldwasser and Regev families and the entire Jewish people happy after hundreds of dark days. But that did not happen. Tears of pain are accompanying their homecoming with a heavy heart. We are heartbroken, but we are standing proud facing the two coffins covering our two soldiers.
They faced a sudden death two years ago on the northern frontier," said Barak.
He vowed at a grim burial held in the northern Israeli town of Nahariya that Israel would "make every effort" to retrieve other captive soldiers, including Gilad Shalit, who was abducted by militants from the Gaza Strip in a 2006 cross-border raid.
"This is the time and the place to say to the Family of Gilad Shalit that we do not cease and we will not cease in the future efforts to quickly return Gilad, safe and sound, home," he added.
Widow Karnit Goldwasser eulogised her husband.
"With you permission my love, the painful private farewell will be done in my own way, in a manner which you would have chosen too, if you could only speak with that same voice, pleasant and calming, authoritative and knowing, loving and caressing, a voice which escorted me from the first day I was honoured know you and till the day you left," she said.
A funeral for Eldad Regev, a second Israeli soldier whose remains were also returned in a black coffin as part of the deal on Wednesday (July 16), was held in the northern city of Haifa.
The Shi'ite group had not commented on the soldiers' condition since capturing them in the war in which some 1,200 Lebanese and 159 Israelis were killed, sparking hopes that they may have survived.
Mourners, many of the strangers, flocked to the houses of Goldwasser and Regev in Nahariya and Kiryat Motskin to pay a tribute to the families. At the house of Zvi Regev, father of Eldad, they lit up hundreds of candles.
The two men were captured in a cross-border Hezbollah raid that sparked a 2006 war.
Hezbollah leader Sayed Hassan Nasrallah made a rare public appearance to welcome the prisoners on Wednesday and further celebrations were held on Thursday as the guerrillas' remains were taken by convoy from southern Lebanon to Beirut.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Wednesday singled out for criticism the honours that went to Samir Qantar, reviled by Israel for a 1979 attack that killed four, in Beirut.
"Woe betide the people who celebrate the release of a beastly man who bludgeoned the skull of a 4-year-old toddler," Olmert said in a statement, referring to the girl Qantar killed with her father.
Qantar has said Israeli soldiers shot the father when confronting the guerrilla squad. He was also wounded, and has said he did not know what happened to the girl because he lost consciousness.
The Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, quoting a senior Israeli source, said Israel now regarded Qantar as "worthy of death."
"Israel will find him and kill him," the source said.
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