Israel buries returned soldiers Regev and Goldwasser (1st Lead)

Jul 17, 2008, 9:09 GMT

Tel Aviv - Thousands of Israelis gathered at a military cemetery in the northern town of Nahariya Thursday, as Israel began laying to rest the two soldiers whose bodies were returned a day earlier as part of a prisoner exchange Lebanon's Hezbollah movement.

A military honour guard accompanied the coffin, wrapped in an blue-and-white Israeli flag, of Ehud (Udi) Goldwasser, to his final wresting place.

Goldwasser was 30 when he and Eldad Regev, then 25, were surprised and abducted by militants of the radical Shiite movement in July 2006. Both were probably killed in the cross-border raid by Hezbollah, according to a preliminary pathological report.

'They say that time does its thing and heals all wounds. Does it?' a tearful Karnit Goldwasser, Ehud's widow, asked in an emotional eulogy.

The abduction 'abruptly cut our shared lives,' she said. The 32-year-old has over the past two years been prominent in the Israeli media as she traveled the world and met foreign leaders, campaigning tirelessly for the return of her husband and of Regev. The couple had been married for six months when Goldwasser was captured on the last day of his reserve duty. They had no children.

'More than once I find myself thinking how our lives would have developed and turned out if we were still together,' she said.

'For you it was just a regular morning when you reported to serve your country,' she added. 'We didn't believe that morning was the last time we'd see each other: The embrace was warm, but regular. The kiss was loving, but hasty.'

Goldwasser's mother, Micky in dark sunglasses, seemed stoic and motionless, when she vowed: 'Udi, eyes may be turned to me and expect tears. But I won't cry. Not now.'

She pointed out that he had been a man of ideals, who fought for the environment and against illegal construction in the occupied territories.

Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak attended the funeral and vowed that Israel also in the future would spare no efforts to bring back soldiers missing in action.

'If heaven forbid somebody will fall into enemy hands . . . the state of Israel ... will carry out every move possible and called for, and I repeat, every move possible and called for, to bring them home.'

'The knowledge that you will be brought home is the spirit which leads you ... and which in the future will also lead to victory,' he said, turning to the soldiers and officers attending the funeral.

Barak was defending the deal with Hezbollah, brokered by a United Nations-appointed German mediator but controversial in Israel, against critics, who had argued that the country had paid too high a price for the two dead soldiers.

In exchange for them, Israel Wednesday freed convicted killer Samir Kuntar and four Hezbollah prisoners, captured during the month- long war that erupted over the July 2006 Hezbollah raid in which Goldwasser and Regev were snatched. Israel also handed over the remains of some 199 fighters and militants, exhumed from an anonymous cemetery for enemy combatants in the north of the country.

Kuntar was serving multiple life terms for leading a 1979 raid into Israel, in which he and his men killed four Israelis, including a father and his young daughter. According to eyewitnesses, Kuntar shot the father in front of the four-year-old girl, then smashed her head with a rifle butt against a rock until she died too.

Ironically, that attack occurred in the same northern Israeli town of Nahariya, Goldwasser's hometown.

Regev was to be laid to rest in his hometown of Qiryat Motzkin, just north of Haifa, later in the afternoon.