Uri Lubrani, Israel’s chief hostage negotiator, says he hopes all of the remaining Westerners held captive in Lebanon will be home by year’s end.
Lubrani said his hope is based on the fact that, “for the first time, all the parties concerned, both sides of the game, are willing and ready to move ahead.”
Now it is a matter of negotiation, he said, “not the problem of principle that has been the case” until recently.
The change in attitude has come about, according to Lubrani, because all of the parties involved “realize that keeping hostages has become a liability, a hump which they have to get rid of if they want to be reintroduced into civilized society.”
Shi’ite kidnappers in Lebanon this week released American hostage Jesse Turner, leaving behind four Americans, a Briton, an Italian and two Germans. Israel also received definitive proof that one of its missing soldiers, Yossi Fink, is dead.
But still unknown are the whereabouts of Ron Arad, the Israeli airman whose plane was shot down in 1986 and who is believed to be alive, Lubrani said.
Three other missing Israeli soldiers have also not been accounted for: Zachary Baumel, Yehuda Katz and Zvi Feldman.
Lubrani, who is the Israeli Defense Ministry’s coordinator of affairs in Lebanon, shared his views with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency while in New York to appear at a fund-raising dinner sponsored by the UJA-Federation of Jewish Philanthropies.
He will be part of Israel’s negotiating team at the Middle East peace conference in Madrid next week and is also credited with orchestrating the Operation Solomon airlift that brought more than 14,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel in a 36-hour period last May.
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