Israel, Hamas Holding Bodies Hostage

For nearly three months Israel has held two Islamic radicals as hostages, saying they will be released only when leaders of their Gaza-based Hamas group disclose the whereabouts of a long-missing Israeli soldier.

It is an unusual situation by any standard. But it includes an element also making it a ghoulish affair for many Israelis and Palestinians: All the key figures, the radicals and the missing soldier, are dead.

The Hamas men were killed by the Israelis in October, one as he and accomplices shot up a downtown Jerusalem street, the other in a failed Israeli army attempt to rescue a soldier he had helped kidnap.

Since then, their bodies have been stored at a forensics institute outside Tel Aviv, and Israel says they will stay there until Hamas reveals where it buried still another soldier whom it had kidnapped and killed, in 1989.

For more than five years Islamic militants in the Gaza Strip have said they will not tell what they did with the soldier, Ilan Saadon, who was 19, until Israel frees imprisoned leaders of Hamas, including the movement’s founder, Sheik Ahmed Yassin.

The gambit has distressed the Saadon family, which wants to give the soldier a proper funeral and has denounced the Islamic radicals for “torturing us.”

Essentially, the Israeli government has now decided that two can play this game.

“It’s a dirty business,” acknowledged Oded Ben-Ami, a spokesman for Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. “But we must do this business. When it hurts you, you’ll probably do everything you can to ease my pain.”

The Israelis want to involve the Palestinian Authority, the selfgovernment in Gaza led by Yasser Arafat that is a Hamas rival. “It puts pressure on these terrorists’ families,” said Amir Avrahami, a Jerusalem lawyer representing the Saadons. “If they pressure the authority, then the authority may in turn pressure Hamas to tell us what they know.”

Thus far, the tactic has not worked. If anything, the authority has taken Hamas’ side. Its chief negotiator with Israel, Nabil Shaath, said two weeks ago that “religious and humanitarian reasons” impelled the Israelis to give up the bodies they hold, regardless of what Hamas does.

In its grisly way, the mutual bodysnatching demonstrates the degree to which Israeli-Palestinian negotiations have gone sour.

Instead of moving briskly ahead toward broadened Palestinian selfrule across the West Bank as well as Gaza, they are stalled on key issues. In some respect, they are even rolling backward.

Events over the last few days carried loud echoes of the decadesold mistrust that was supposed to have been dissolved by the peace agreement signed in September 1993 at the White House.

This entire week has been studded with shootouts between Israelis and Palestinians, with eight people killed and with each side in most cases blaming the other.

All but one of the eight were Palestinians. The Israeli was a settler, Ofra Felix, 20, who was riding with her brother-in-law and his two small children when Arab gunmen ambushed their car in the West Bank on Friday.

Particularly ominous for peace hopes were the shooting deaths of three Palestinian police officers in Gaza on Monday.

Exchanges of fire between the police and Israeli soldiers have come more often lately, raising questions about how long the two forces can maintain the cooperation they have managed, against high odds, for the last eight months.

Israel’s continued expansion of settlements, especially around Jerusalem, has touched off vibrant disputes once again, and Palestinian protests on this issue seem likely to spread.

In the absence of progress in peace talks, the Palestinians have even renewed a demand that was dormant for months: that Israel release several thousand Palestinians from its prisons.