Pat Dollard | Young Americans

NOTE: Conflicting reports abound with regard to the validity of the reports that say the two IDF soldiers captured by Hezbollah, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, are alive and had been transferred to Iran in recent days. Their capture sparked the war between Israel and Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon last year.

I personally like to be of the “Glass is Half Full” camp and hold out hopes that the boys are alive. ~Bashman

Hizbullah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah said Tuesday that there was “positive progress” in negotiations to swap captive reservists Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev for Lebanese prisoners in Israel.

“I assert that there are strenuous negotiations, continuing sessions which will be resumed in days,” Nasrallah said of the talks.

“For the first time I can speak about hope, about optimism and about positive progress and about an opportunity to reach a great achievement and a full exchange,” Nasrallah said on Hizbullah’s Al-Manar television.

“I can speak for the first time about positive progress in the main negotiations over the two soldiers and the prisoners,” he said. “I assert that there are strenuous negotiations, continuing sessions which will be resumed in days,” Nasrallah said.

Nasrallah spoke on Tuesday in his first public address since Hizbullah and Israel swapped the bodies of two guerrillas and a drowned fisherman on Monday, which he called a “humanitarian act.”

He said the swap was not meant to build trust between the two sides but rather was a goodwill gesture that was the initiative of an international mediator.

Channel 1 analyst Ehud Ya’ari said that Nasrallah stated that Monday’s swap was not meant to “build trust” - since, he said, there could be no “trust” between an “occupying power” and a group “fighting for freedom” - but as an attempt to break the current dead end.

Ya’ari, who translated the main points of Nasrallah’s speech from Arabic, said that the Hizbullah head for the first time spoke in concrete terms of days and months - rather than years - as a timeframe for the release of Goldwasser and Regev.

He said the aim of Hizbullah’s negotiations was “to bring back all the prisoners and the remains of the martyrs.”

The Hizbullah leader demanded that Israel free four Iranian diplomats allegedly held by Israel. He also demanded the release of Lebanese prisoner Samir Kuntar - who is serving multiple life terms for the killing of three members of the Haran family and policeman Eliahu Shahar in a raid on Nahariya in 1979 - in addition to four Hizbullah guerrillas and a Lebanese citizen convicted of spying.

Israel, Nasrallah said, had stipulated the release of Ron Arad and the three IDF soldiers that went missing during the Sultan Yakoub battle in 1982.

However, Nasrallah referred to a document he claimed was given to Israel that showed where Arad had been searched for and claimed that no traces had been found of the captured navigator.

The Hizbullah leader said that he did not have anything to say that would shed light on Arad’s fate and seemed to be calling for a deal excluding the IAF navigator.

Goldwasser’s mother, Miki, said Tuesday after hearing Nasrallah’s speech that she was very excited and hoped he would stand by his word. Goldwasser said that she held out hope, not only for the release of her son, but for the release of the Lebanese prisoners.

“I really hope he stands by what he said,” Goldwasser told Channel 1. Goldwasser said that Nasrallah had raised not only her hopes and those of her family, but the hopes of the Lebanese mothers whose children were imprisoned in Israel.

Goldwasser has made impassioned appeals to the Lebanese public, asking the nation’s people to pressure Hizbullah to free her son and Regev.

Ehud’s wife, Karnit, echoed her mother-in-law’s words, saying that she hoped Nasrallah’s optimism would “bear fruit,” and that the Lebanese families of prisoners in Israel would keep working to free their sons.

JP