Israel Matzav

All present and accounted for, sir

The IDF announced on Thursday evening that it has accounted for all soldiers and that no soldier has been kidnapped.

The IDF on Thursday night allayed suspicions that a soldier was kidnapped after all soldiers were said to be accounted for at the end of a protracted roll call.

...

The army immediately initiated an emergency procedure roll call throughout all active units, including reservists, after a female soldier who was getting off a bus near an air force base outside the airport told her commanders that she had seen two civilians forcefully pushing a soldier into a car and then fleeing the scene. She was some distance from the scene she had witnessed, officials said, noting that she had passed a lie-detector test.

The IDF reviewed the reliability of the soldier's testimony - the only eyewitness account - while police scrambled helicopters to join ground units trying to prevent the alleged kidnappers from fleeing the region. By the evening, almost all soldiers had been accounted for.

In late evening, according to Palestinian security sources, searches took place at the entrances to Hebron, with hundreds of cars stopped and drivers' identities checked. The main entrance to Kalkilya was also blocked.

Unfortunately, there have been way too many incidents of soldiers being kidnapped in the 18 years that I have lived here. This one sounded authentic. Fortunately, it proved not to be. But I would not dismiss it as a hoax (as one commenter to my previous post did). The eyewitness was apparently mistaken, but I doubt she was trying to fool anyone.

I found out about the IDF giving the all-clear a little while before it was released publicly. During that time, I tried to think of ways of preventing kidnappings in the future, and the best thing I could think of was a buddy system (which would work for the IDF but not for civilians, who have also now been made into targets by Hamas and Hezbullah. But this story shows that the IDF does have a system in place for discovering quickly whether a soldier is missing and that's a good thing.

While we hope and pray we will not have to cope with another kidnapping, reality in this region is that the terror groups will try again sooner or later.

The picture at the top of this post is of Nachshon Wachsman HY"D (may God avenge his blood). Nachshon was kidnapped near Ben Gurion Airport - the same area that was under suspicion today - in October 1994 and was eventually murdered by his kidnappers when the tried to rescue him a few days later. Nachshon's full story is here.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 2:14 AM