‘ISRAEL BOMBING KILLED CAPTIVES IN LEBANON’

Israeli bombardment killed two Israeli soldiers whose capture by Hezbollah began a war in 2006 and whose bodies were returned to Israel two years later, a Lebanese minister said on October 5. Hezbollah handed over the bodies of Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev in a prisoner exchange. Israeli officials have said they were badly wounded, one of them fatally, when they were captured by the Shiite militant group in a cross-border raid in July 2006.

Health Minister Ali Hassan Khalil, publishing his memoirs of the 34-day war between Hezbollah and Israel in Lebanon’s Al-Safir newspaper, quoted a Hezbollah official as saying the two Israelis were killed by Israeli bombing. “Israeli bombardment in recent days led to the death of the two Israeli prisoners.” He said the soldiers’ captors had taken every precaution to avoid them being killed “but the expansion (of the area) of the bombardment and the use of big rockets ... led to this.”