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Waiting to mourn: a Palestinian mother longs for missing sons
AL-BIRA, West Bank, By Hossam EZZEDINE
AFP - July 15, 2008
 
Every time Palestinian Naama Audallah hears of a new prisoner exchange she reaches for the pictures of two sons she has not seen since 1998 and who were probably killed in battle. The 67-year-old cannot be certain about their fate because she has not seen them since they disappeared during a battle with Israeli troops outside the West Bank town of Hebron in which the army said they were killed.

"I want to see their bodies, so at least I can know whether they are alive or dead," she says as she fingers fading photos of Adel, 35, and Emad, 33.

Her situation is not unlike that of the families of Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser, two Israeli soldiers seized in a deadly cross-border raid by the Shiite militant group Hezbollah that sparked the 2006 Lebanon war.

Like them, she has heard her sons are dead but she has never seen proof.

The two soldiers, who Israel believes to be dead, are to be returned on Wednesday in exchange for five Lebanese prisoners and the remains of some 200 Hezbollah and Palestinian fighters killed over the past several years.

Naama wishes the exchange would bring her boys home as well.

"Every time I hear talk about an exchange of prisoners and bodies it opens the wound and I go back to waiting in the hope that I will see them again before I die," she says. "I follow the news every day."

Israel informed Naama's family in 1998 that the two men, both senior fighters in the Islamist Hamas movement, were killed, but the army has never released their bodies.

"I never saw their bodies and I don't know why Israel never turned them over to us as it has done with so many other people it has killed in the Palestinian territories," she says.

An army spokeswoman, when asked about the fate of the two men, said the subject was "complicated" and that she would not be in a position to comment until later in the week.

Having never seen the bodies, the men's families cannot shake off the hope that they may still be alive somewhere.

"Every time we hear of an exchange of prisoners or bodies, we expect that Adel and Emad, because they are considered leaders in Hamas, will be at the top of the list," Adel's widow Huda says, her eyes looking out from a black veil.

"There are always doubts swirling around us about whether they are still alive, because we have no clear proof that they were martyred," she says. "We yearn for their bodies."

The men were both married and left behind seven children between them.

Relatives say they have spoken to Hezbollah through intermediaries and asked that the two men be included in Wednesday's exchange, which will include Palestinians killed during raids on Israel from southern Lebanon.

The family has also hired an Israeli lawyer who convinced the High Court to issue four rulings ordering the army to release the bodies, all of which have been ignored, according to the men's 30-year-old brother Amer.

While the women cling to hope, Amer has darker suspicions.

"I do not think Israel will release the bodies of my brothers because I am sure that there are secrets the army does not want to reveal," he says.

"If my brothers were martyred, then Israel killed them in some way it does not want anyone to know about ... Or perhaps they are still alive."

 
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