Arad Report: 'Ridiculous Babble'

Israeli military officials have labeled as "ridiculous babble" a report by Hizbullah terrorists on the fate of downed IAF navigator Ron Arad submitted to <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Israel and claiming that the missing airman had managed to escape his captors and disappeared into the wilderness.

Arad's aircraft was shot down over southern Lebanon in 1986 and he was taken captive by Amal terrorists, who transferred him to Hizbullah.  It is believed that Hizbullah later "sold" him to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards in 1988 before the intelligence trail went cold.

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The text of the letter written by Hizbullah, revealed Wednesday on the eve of the Day of Atonement in the Hebrew-language Ma'ariv newspaper, said that Arad was being held in a family home at the time. Between May 4 and May 5, 1988, the men of the family left for an adjacent village and left Arad with the women, they reported.

The Israeli navigator managed to escape during the night, claimed the terrorist group. "It's likely that he collapsed, was hurt, fell from a high cliff or was even attacked by a wild animal," the letter concluded.

Israeli military officials labeled the letter "ridiculous babble."

It is widely known that religious Muslim men would never leave their women alone with any man, let alone a Jewish soldier, captive or otherwise.

The report was submitted as part of the exchange deal in which Israel received the badly decomposed bodies of IDF reservists Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, who were kidnapped and murdered in an attack that touched off the 2006 Second Lebanon War.

Lebanese Druze child killer Samir Kuntar and four Hizbullah guerilla terrorists were freed from Israeli jails and returned to Lebanon, along with the bodies of 199 dead terrorists as part of the deal. Five Palestinian Authority Arabs jailed for attacking Israeli citizens by hurling rocks at their cars as they drove through Judea and Samaria also were freed in accordance with the German-brokered agreement.

Kuntar Back to Terrorist Business

Kuntar, who was serving four life sentences in an Israeli prison, was shown in a recently released terrorist training video practicing to commit terrorist attacks, firing a gun and anti-tank missiles.

The Lebanese child-killer led a group of terrorists that murdered four Israelis in 1979. Kuntar killed a young father in front of his four-year-old daughter and then smashed the little girl's head with a rifle butt, killing her also.

The family of policeman Eliyahu Shachar, one of Kuntar's victims, expressed anger Tuesday upon hearing of the video. “The Samir Kuntar deal was contemptible and we said from the beginning that we'd be sorry for it,” said Shachar's brother Yoram. “What you see in the video is nothing. Kuntar will carry out a mega-attack against Israel," he warned, adding that the Jewish State "has abandoned herself to the arch-murderers.”