US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met with the families of recently kidnapped IDF soldiers on Tuesday. United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon met the families on Monday. Shlomo Goldwasser, whose son is currently being held captive by the Lebanese Hizbullah terrorist organization, said that neither meeting brought the families any news about the fate of their sons.


"However," Goldwasser told Arutz-7, "we were encouraged by Mrs. Rice that she very much feels herself committed to freeing our sons. She mentions them in every meeting with anyone that can help and she promised to continue to do so in the future as well."

"Mrs. Rice very much feels committed to freeing our sons." - Shlomo Goldwasser



In her meeting with the soldiers' families, Rice informed them about her intention to encourage bi-weekly meetings between Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas. "She very much reminded me of Henry Kissinger in his shuttle diplomacy here," Goldwasser commented.
"Regarding our sons, it did not really play a role [in her diplomacy], except on the declarative level. I don't know, I can't say that anything is happening here on the operative level, but she makes it clear to all those involved that the release of the hostages, especially [Gilad] Shalit, is a condition for normalization [of relations with Israel]."


Corporal Gilad Shalit was kidnapped on June 25, 2006 by terrorists from the Hamas organization, which currently rules the Palestinian Authority, and allied terror groups. Shalit is thought to be held somewhere in the Gaza Strip. IDF reservists Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev were kidnapped by Hizbullah terrorists and transferred across the Lebanese frontier on July 12, 2006, precipitating a brief war between Lebanese terrorist forces and Israel over the summer.


Shlomo Goldwasser said that the families of the hostages receive general information from the government regarding what steps are being taken to secure their relatives' release. However, as the government mostly operates through "secret channels," as Goldwasser put it, the families do not know the content or details of those governmental efforts.


Parallel with official efforts, the families are making every possible effort to bring the issue of their kidnapped relatives to the attention of all the world's decisionmakers, encouraging them to take action. "We traveled around the world quite a bit in recent months," Goldwasser said, "in Europe, in the United States, as well as in Russia, and those trips

The families of the hostages receive general information from the government.

are paying off now, as you can see, as every diplomat that arrives in Israel wants to meet with us and express his sympathies, and I'd even say that they attempt to do various things on the declarative level, but not on the operational level."


Goldwasser added, "There is no doubt that the key to the resolution of our problem is not in the hands of this or that [foreign] government, but in the hands of the government of Israel and of Hassan Nasrallah [leader of the Hizbullah in Lebanon]."


Goldwasser concluded the interview by saying of the upcoming Passover festival, "A holiday in the shadow of [Ehud's] absence is not the same... Everything will be bitter herbs, not just the regular bitter herbs [traditionally eaten during the Passover Seder]."