BEIRUT, Lebanon (AP) — Hezbollah’s leader on Wednesday confirmed for the first time that his group will hand over two captured Israeli soldiers and information on a missing Israeli airman in exchange for five Lebanese prisoners in Israel.

Israeli officials believe the two soldiers are dead, but Sheik Hassan Nasrallah said he had not given Israel any indication of their fate. He called reports that they are dead “speculation … not based on anything tangible.”

Give us a break. The Israelis never get back live bodies, only sacks of bones bearing evidence of torture. It was the abduction of these two soldiers that sparked the war with the Hezbollah in Lebanon that brought a huge amount of destruction to that country. The plain truth is that Hezbollah was shocked with the ferocity of the Israeli response. While Hezbollah wasn’t defeated and Israel was called the loser by many in the International community, certainly by the Arab nations and by many at home as well, the fact remains that there has not been one single further abduction of any Israeli citizen or any further attack or incursion emanating from Lebanon since.

It’s this latter fact that you won’t read in the news anywhere, as it tends to make Israel start looking like the winner of that fracas, after all. In plain truth, no one was a winner. The Lebanese people suffered considerably, there were lost lives on both sides, the war was costly financially for Israel and devastating financially for Lebanon. The only way Israel could have “won” the war would have been to flatten most of the country as that’s about the only way to get rid of Hezbollah.

That terrorist organization, Syrian based and financed, is also supported by most of the muslim population of Lebanon, which has a mostly muslim population now that they’ve killed off most of the Christians. Realistically, the only way to get Hezbollah out of Lebanon is for the people to withdraw their support, and the only way for Israel to react to Hezbollah attacks is to do again what they did before and flatten a huge portion of their bases of operation with total disregard for the civilians in their midst. Those civilians are the ones making it possible for Hezbollah to operate.

Violence, power and fear are the only things Muslims respect, as Israel knows well and the rest of the world has come to learn.

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