Tel Aviv - Thousands of Israelis gathered at a military
cemetery in the northern town of Nahariya Thursday, as Israel began
laying to rest the two soldiers whose bodies were returned a day
earlier as part of a prisoner exchange Lebanon's Hezbollah movement.
A military honour guard accompanied the coffin, wrapped in an
blue-and-white Israeli flag, of Ehud (Udi) Goldwasser, to his final
wresting place.
Goldwasser was 30 when he and Eldad Regev, then 25, were surprised
and abducted by militants of the radical Shiite movement in July
2006. Both were probably killed in the cross-border raid by
Hezbollah, according to a preliminary pathological report.
'They say that time does its thing and heals all wounds. Does it?'
a tearful Karnit Goldwasser, Ehud's widow, asked in an emotional
eulogy.
The abduction 'abruptly cut our shared lives,' she said. The
32-year-old has over the past two years been prominent in the Israeli
media as she traveled the world and met foreign leaders, campaigning
tirelessly for the return of her husband and of Regev. The couple had
been married for six months when Goldwasser was captured on the last
day of his reserve duty. They had no children.
'More than once I find myself thinking how our lives would have
developed and turned out if we were still together,' she said.
'For you it was just a regular morning when you reported to serve
your country,' she added. 'We didn't believe that morning was the
last time we'd see each other: The embrace was warm, but regular. The
kiss was loving, but hasty.'
Goldwasser's mother, Micky in dark sunglasses, seemed stoic and
motionless, when she vowed: 'Udi, eyes may be turned to me and
expect tears. But I won't cry. Not now.'
She pointed out that he had been a man of ideals, who fought for
the environment and against illegal construction in the occupied
territories.
Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak attended the funeral and
vowed that Israel also in the future would spare no efforts to bring
back soldiers missing in action.
'If heaven forbid somebody will fall into enemy hands . . . the
state of Israel ... will carry out every move possible and called
for, and I repeat, every move possible and called for, to bring them
home.'
'The knowledge that you will be brought home is the spirit which
leads you ... and which in the future will also lead to victory,' he
said, turning to the soldiers and officers attending the funeral.
Barak was defending the deal with Hezbollah, brokered by a United
Nations-appointed German mediator but controversial in Israel,
against critics, who had argued that the country had paid too high a
price for the two dead soldiers.
In exchange for them, Israel Wednesday freed convicted killer
Samir Kuntar and four Hezbollah prisoners, captured during the month-
long war that erupted over the July 2006 Hezbollah raid in which
Goldwasser and Regev were snatched. Israel also handed over the
remains of some 199 fighters and militants, exhumed from an anonymous
cemetery for enemy combatants in the north of the country.
Kuntar was serving multiple life terms for leading a 1979 raid
into Israel, in which he and his men killed four Israelis, including
a father and his young daughter. According to eyewitnesses, Kuntar
shot the father in front of the four-year-old girl, then smashed her
head with a rifle butt against a rock until she died too.
Ironically, that attack occurred in the same northern Israeli town
of Nahariya, Goldwasser's hometown.
Regev was to be laid to rest in his hometown of Qiryat Motzkin,
just north of Haifa, later in the afternoon.
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