Hezbollah Captures Three: Israel's Border Tensions Escalate

Hezbollah grabbed three Israeli soldiers from a border position and vanished into Lebanon. Israel said the men were kidnapped. Hezbollah called them prisoners of war. One soldier was wounded in the raid and likely died shortly after. The other two may have survived longer, but nobody knows. Israel traded 400 prisoners for their bodies and a businessman in 2004. They'd been dead the whole time. The cross-border raid occurred on October 7, 2000, exactly two weeks after Hezbollah's leadership publicly vowed to seize Israeli soldiers as bargaining chips for the release of Lebanese prisoners held in Israeli jails. Three soldiers from the IDF's Golani Brigade were captured from a patrol position at Har Dov, in the disputed Shebaa Farms area, in a meticulously planned operation that involved Hezbollah fighters disguised in UN uniforms. A rescue attempt by the Israeli army was rebuffed, and a subsequent operation to extract the soldiers led to the death of another Israeli soldier. Hezbollah presented the capture as a legitimate act of resistance against continued Israeli occupation of the Shebaa Farms, a claim Israel and the UN rejected since the UN had certified Israel's complete withdrawal from Lebanon five months earlier, excepting the Shebaa Farms whose ownership was disputed between Lebanon and Syria. The capture became a protracted diplomatic crisis. Israel demanded proof that the soldiers were alive; Hezbollah refused to provide any information about their condition. International mediators, including German intelligence, spent years negotiating an exchange. The eventual deal in January 2004 returned the bodies of all three soldiers along with a kidnapped Israeli businessman in exchange for 400 Palestinian and Arab prisoners held by Israel, plus the remains of 59 Lebanese fighters. The confirmation that the soldiers had been dead, possibly from the moment of capture, deepened Israeli anger at Hezbollah's refusal to disclose their fate.