Families of missing soldiers lash state, not Zygier

The families of three missing IDF soldiers said the state is to blame for failing to return their loved ones, and not the bungled efforts of a Mossad spy who committed suicide after being imprisoned for reportedly compromising a mission to bring their bodies back to Israel.

“They are putting the blame on Zygier, because the Mossad can’t return the missing [soldiers],” said Pirchia Heiman, the sister of Yehuda Katz, one of three IDF soldiers who went missing during the First Lebanon War in 1982.

Earlier on Tuesday, ABC News Australia reported that Zygier had inadvertently compromised a top-secret plan by the Mossad to smuggle the three soldiers’ bodies back to Israel, after the spy agency apparently identified their graves in Lebanon. But Mossad sources later Tuesday told Channel 10 news that the ABC report was “nonsense” and that Zygier had nothing to do with the case of the three soldiers.

“For 30 years, we’ve been hearing stories about the Battle of Sultan Yacoub. But it is not Ben Zygier’s fault that they never found my brother and the other two who are missing, but the state’s,” Heiman said, according to a Ynet report on Tuesday.

Katz, Zachary Baumel, and Tzvi Feldman were killed or captured in 1982 during a tank battle, and their whereabouts have remained a mystery ever since. While most Israelis believe they were killed in the battle, the three are still officially listed as “missing in action.”

“We want them to return our brother as is, whether alive or not,” said Anat Feldman, sister of Tzvi Feldman. “To this day, we are angry at the state because the system can’t tell what his condition is.”

Anat Feldman recalled that on Monday a reporter, who spoke Hebrew with an accent, called another sibling of hers and asked for an interview.

“It never occurred to me that Zygier was connected to us,” she said. “We, the siblings, think that perhaps there are secrets buried in Syria, and when the whole mess there ends, who knows, perhaps our people will emerge, or others who have information about the missing [soldiers].

A Lebanese man told ABC — which originally broke the story that Zygier was the mysterious “Prisoner X,” whose jail-cell suicide was under censorship — that Israel had undertaken a complex operation to exhume the bodies of three IDF soldiers.

The three are believed to have been captured or killed by Syrian forces in the Battle of Sultan Yacoub, which took place near Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley — and although witnesses claimed the soldiers were “paraded through the streets of Damascus, [the] Mossad believed their graves were in Lebanon,” the report said.

A previous investigation by Der Spiegel magazine and Australian Fairfax Media had painted Zygier as a failing spy who was desperate to win back the Mossad’s respect. He therefore went on a rogue mission to try to impress the agency, and inadvertently exposed the Mossad’s Lebanese contacts to a Hezbollah operative. Tuesday’s Australian report took the narrative forward, indicating that the rogue operation derailed Israel’s painstaking bid to retrieve the remains of its fallen soldiers.

Zygier’s activities were eventually discovered by Israeli authorities and he was arrested in 2010. While awaiting trial, he was secretly held in solitary confinement and, because no details of his identity or case were publicized, he became known as “Prisoner X.” Authorities reportedly sought a lengthy prison sentence for the offenses. A plea bargain involving a 10-year term was under discussion when Zygier, who was 34 and married with two children, took his own life by hanging himself with a bed sheet in the shower on December 15, 2010.

Amid myriad speculations and theories regarding the Zygier case and his alleged crimes, none of which suggested deliberate treason, Israeli authorities have remained tight-lipped over the precise details of the story.