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Victims of Hezbollah

Kidnapped Israeli Soldiers Believed to Be Dead

Israel now believes two Israeli soldiers kidnapped before the Lebanon war are dead. Jerusalem may come forward with the information to keep Hezbollah from demanding a high price for their bodies -- although it would be a setback for Ehud Olmert, who made the soldiers' return an objective of the 2006 war.

Karnit Goldwasser has tried just about everything in her power to find out what happened to her husband. She has appeared on talk shows with Larry King and German talk show host Günther Jauch. She approached Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during his visit to the United Nations in New York. And she met with politicians almost weekly, listening to them declare their solidarity with her cause with carefully chosen words.

Recently, when yet another political luminary -- United States National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley -- paid his respects, Goldwasser finally lost her patience, telling Hadley: "I don't want them to pity me. I want to be told the truth."

The truth could be revealed soon. Nineteen months after the kidnapping of Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev by the Lebanese Hezbollah, there has been a dramatic shift in the negotiations for their return. Until now, the Israeli government assumed that at least one and perhaps even both of the soldiers survived the Shiite militia's attack on their border patrol on July 12, 2006. But intelligence information suggests that this assumption was wrong. According to information obtained by SPIEGEL, Jerusalem has now concluded that the two soldiers are dead.

Even in the absence of unequivocal evidence, the negotiators have already abandoned hope. Nevertheless, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is hesitant to publicly pronounce Goldwasser and Regev dead. It would be a bitter setback for Olmert, who defined the return of the soldiers as the objective of the Lebanon war in the summer of 2006. In addition, under religious law clear evidence is needed to pronounce a Jew dead.

Originally, Jerusalem would have been prepared to release Samir Kuntar, a Lebanese who brutally murdered an Israeli man and his daughter in 1979, in return for getting the soldiers back alive. This plan, already controversial in Israel, is now irrelevant. To expose Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and prevent Hezbollah from demanding a high price for the return of the soldiers' bodies, Jerusalem is considering going public with the truth in the coming weeks.

It would be a low point in a long series of miscalculations for the Hezbollah leader. Even after the abduction of Goldwasser and Regev, Nasrallah expected only a limited reprisal. "If we had known that Israel would have launched a major attack on Lebanon because of the two soldiers, we would not have captured them," the terrorist leader revealed after the war. Nasrallah is aware of the Israelis' plans to pronounce the soldiers dead. He also knows that he has very few trump cards left. This became abundantly clear when his chief of operations, Imad Mughniyeh, was killed in Damascus last week.

The attack on Mughniyeh bears the handwriting of Israel's Mossad intelligence agency, even though Israel has denied any involvement. When Mughniyeh's body was carried to his grave in Beirut on Thursday, in front of a crowd of thousands, Nasrallah issued this undisguised threat: "Zionists, if you want this type of open war, then let the whole world hear: let it be an open war."