Mossad: That's a fanstasy
In an earlier post, I reported that Australian television is claiming that Ben Zygier, known as Prisoner X, was sent to jail for
botching an operation to recover the bodies of three IDF soldiers who disappeared during the First Lebanon War (Operation Peace for Galilee).
Now, the former head of the Mossad division who deals with soldiers missing in action says that there was never any such operation planned by the Mossad.
It didn't exist.
Australian
state television said Zygier unwittingly sabotaged a secret 2007 Mossad mission
to exhume the bodies of three Israeli tank crewmen captured and killed in a
battle with Syrian forces, and disclosed the identity of an alleged Lebanese
agent while making an unauthorized attempt to recruit a man he thought was a
Hezbollah member.
The agent was tasked, according to an Australian
Broadcasting Corporation report, with digging up the bodies of three fallen IDF
soldiers killed in the 1982 Sultan Yacoub battle.
Rami Igra, who headed
the Mossad’s MIA and Captive Persons Division, said the soldiers had been
declared dead by the Military Rabbinate, and that it was wrong to believe that
Mossad would launch an operation to retrieve the bodies.
“The rabbinate
would not declare them dead unless it had undeniable evidence. The claim that an
operation would be launched to retrieve [the bodies] is not only empty, it is
science fiction,” Igra said.
“Zygier was facing 22 years in prison – that
kind of charge is for treachery, not an imaginary operation,” Igra
said. “These claims are nonsense.”
Hmmm.
Labels: Hezbullah, Lebanon, Mossad, Operation Peace for Galilee, Prisoner X, Syria
Zygier imprisoned because he botched operation to retrieve Sultan Yaqub bodies
According to the Australian television program that originally broke the story, Ben Zygier, the Australian-born Mossad spy who hung himself in an Israeli maximum security prison where he was known as Prisoner X, was originally imprisoned by Israel because he
revealed the identity of a Lebanese spy who was arranging for the return of the bodies of
Zach Baumol, Yehuda Katz and Zvi Feldman, who disappeared during the Battle of Sultan Yaqub during the First Lebanon War in 1982. This is from the first link.
According to the report, in 2007 the Mossad recruited former Lebanese
military leader Ziad Al Homsi through, what he claims were, operatives
working for the intelligence organization in China and Thailand.
In strides to get ahead and please the Mossad, Zygier apparently
revealed Al Homsi's name to a Lebanese Hezbollah agent who subsequently
turned him in to Lebanese authorities. Al Homsi faced a 15-year prison
sentence, but was released after only three years.
The Mossad
wanted to utilize Al Homsi, who was well connected from his
participation in operations against Israeli troops in the Bekka Valley
where the remains of three soldiers killed in the Battle of Sultan
Yocoub were believed to rest, ABC Australia reported.
Al Homsi
reportedly said he was charged with the task to organize for the
collection of the missing Israeli soldiers' bodies and to provide them
to another Mossad-aligned party that would carry out the remaining
recovery process.
Al Homsi claimed in the ABC report that he had
worked as a double agent for Lebanon and its intelligence officials had
supported his efforts to gain knowledge of the Israelis' bodies to be
used for bargaining the release of Palestinian prisoners.
I thought I saw somewhere that Israel had denied this story, but I'm not finding it right now.
Labels: Battle of Sultan Yaqub, Mossad, Operation Peace for Galilee, Prisoner X
The first helicopter war
This week marks thirty years since the outbreak of the First Lebanon War, which was the first war in which the IDF deployed helicopters.
The helicopters were a smashing success.
The Israel Air Force’s history with attack helicopters dates back to before the Yom Kippur War in 1973 when Brig.-Gen. (res.) Nehemia Dagan, a decorated helicopter pilot, urged the military’s top brass to invest in creating an attack helicopter capability.
“We originally raised the idea before 1973 but there were people in the IDF – particularly in the ground forces but also in the air force – who were opposed to the investment,” Dagan recalled in an interview this week.
The realization that the air force required such a capability came after the war, during which IDF armored divisions and infantry brigades encountered fierce resistance from the Egyptian and Syrian military, and fighter jets were downed by sophisticated Russian-made surface-to-air missile systems.
“Their ability to fly low gave the helicopters an advantage over fighter jets when facing air-defense systems,” Dagan explained.
The first helicopters arrived in 1975 and two squadrons were established – one of Cobras and the other of Defenders. A number of years later, the IAF installed TOW anti-tank-missile launchers on the helicopters but it wasn’t until the 1982 war that they saw combat.
During the war, Dagan said, the two squadrons destroyed a combined 110 armored vehicles – mostly from the Syrian military.
“It was an unbelievable success,” he said. “The two squadrons destroyed more armored vehicles together than each of the two divisions that operated in Lebanon did on their own.”
Read the whole thing.
Labels: helicopter, Operation Peace for Galilee
A modern blood libel
A Dutch director claims to have seen then-Defense Minister Ariel Sharon
shoot two 'Palestinian' toddlers at close range near the Sabra and Shatilla 'refugee camps' in 1982. Sharon was in Israel at the time.
The claim first appeared in the Volkskrant, the third largest paper in the Netherlands, in an interview with the well-known Dutch-Jewish director George Sluizer. According to Sluizer, 78, he witnessed Sharon killing two Palestinian toddlers with a pistol in 1982 near the refugee camp Sabra-Shatilla while filming a documentary there.
“I met Sharon and saw him kill two children before my eyes,” said Sluizer, who lives in Amsterdam. Sluizer has made several documentaries about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but is best known for directing The Vanishing with Jeff Bridges and Kiefer Sutherland in 1992.
Sluizer repeated the accusation in an interview for Vrij Nederland, an intellectual magazine, published on November 13 ahead of a screening of his film at the prestigious International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. “Sharon shot two children like you shoot rabbits, in front of my eyes,” he said.
The children, according to Sluizer, “were toddlers, two or three years old. He shot them from a distance of 10 meters with a pistol that he carried. I was very close to him.” Sluizer added he thought this happened in November, when Sharon was Israel’s minister of defense, but he was not sure of the month.
...
Sharon’s successor as defense minister, Moshe Arens, said Sluizer’s account was “a lie.” According to Arens, “Sharon would never shoot a child and he was not in Lebanon in November of 1982. Thirdly, protocol prohibits ministers from wearing weapons. As civilians they are not allowed to carry firearms.”
Amram Mitzna, former chairman of the Israeli Labor Party who served under Sharon as head of the Syrian front during the First Lebanon War, called Sluizer’s account “total nonsense.” Mitzna added: “I attacked Sharon politically over his decisions, but Sharon would never do a thing like that. It’s completely ridiculous.”
Yossef Levy, senior spokesperson for the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, called Sluizer's account a "crude and disgraceful lie. It is hard to believe that any reasonable person would take seriously this kind of modern blood libel, which is not supported by a single shred of evidence."
This is the same country that tried to prevent Geert Wilders from running for office and put him on trial for speaking against Islam.
Read the whole thing. The only mystery about this story is why the Dutch media published it in the first place. Oops. I guess that's not such a mystery either.
Labels: Ariel Sharon, Moshe Arens, Operation Peace for Galilee, Sabra and Shatilla
