Friends and family marked the one-year anniversary of the burial of Ehud Goldwasser on Friday. A ceremony was held in the military cemetery of Nahariya.
Goldwasser was killed in 2006 while serving in the IDF reserves near the Lebanon border. He and a fellow reservist, Eldad Regev, were taken hostage by Hizbullah terrorists at some point shortly before or shortly after their deaths.
The two reservists' bodies were traded to Israel in July 2008 in exchange for several Hizbullah terrorists and notorious terrorist murderer Samir Kuntar.
Ehud Goldwasser was 30 at the time of his death. He was survived by his parents, two younger brothers and his wife of ten months, Karnit.
On Thursday, a major event was held in support of kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit, who was abducted in 2006 shortly before Goldwasser and Regev were taken hostage. Like the two soldiers taken by Hizbullah, Shalit was kidnapped as part of a fatal terrorist attack on an IDF patrol on Israeli soil.
The rally for Shalit took place on the waters of the Kinneret (Sea of Galilee), where 1,800 young men and women from the kibbutz movement sailed rafts bearing pro-Shalit slogans across the lake.
"We can't continue like this, without knowing Shalit's condition,” organizers explained. The event aimed to fight public apathy to Shalit's fate, they added.