Coming Home To Israel

"Several days after the burial ceremony of Zachary Baumel, may his memory be a blessing, the attorney general was requested by government officials to make his opinion known about the possibility of releasing two Syrian prisoners who are held in Israel via a pardon by the president, as a gesture of good will."
Israeli Justice Ministry

"[Returning Baumel was first and foremost] a humanistic gesture [Israel agreed to release two imprisoned Syrians in return for Baumel's body]."
"When the opportunity arose to transfer the body of the Israeli soldier – we decided to do it. We thank the Syrians for their cooperation."
Alexander Lavrentyev, Russian intermediary

Netanyahu attending a ceremony for the return of the body of Israeli soldier Zachary Baumel in Moscow, April 4, 2019    Credit: Kobi Gideon / GPO

"Our military together with Syrian partners established the place of his burial."
"We are very pleased that at home they can give him the necessary military honors."
Russian President Vladimir Putin

"It was a race against time, a competition between ISIS, which was still looking for these corpses, and the Russians who also wanted to have these corpses."
"That's why they demanded the support of the opposition [Syrian Sunni rebels] to get in and get out."
Unidentified Syrian informant

 The National Center for Forensic Medicine in Israel is involved with a critical mission; to identify remains of Israeli military personnel as well as citizens whose bones have been retrieved by government intervention and 'trade' for imprisoned Palestinians or others held in Israeli jails sentenced to prison for crimes committed. Israel has been known to hand over hundreds of Arab prisoners in exchange for one Israeli, or his/her remains.

This is a nation that takes repatriation of body parts seriously; that Israelis must be returned home to be buried in dignity and with all due commemoration. That this is a high priority for the Jewish state is well known to its adversaries. Kidnapping, capturing and taking Israeli prisoners has high value for groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, for Fatah and Islamic State, viewing them as means by which deals can be cut to their advantage with Israel in exchange for their return, dead or alive.

"From time to time they'd bring the samples. It's body remains. It's bones. It was always: maybe this time maybe this time, maybe this time...", mused Chen Kugel, head of the forensics centre. He and his unit are assigned to check whether DNA matches that of Israeli soldiers missing in action behind enemy lines. Early this year a bag containing bones arrived at his laboratory. Staff at the Center determined the bones to be those of missing Staff Sgt. Zachary Baumel. Israel had been searching for those remains for 37 years.

When Israel Defence Forces entered Lebanon for the purpose of disarming and disbanding the Palestine Liberation Organization militias that had been staging cross-border assaults from their Lebanon bases into Israel in 1982, during a battle in the Bekaa Valley, Israeli troops clashed with Lebanese and Syrian troops. Staff Sgt. Baumel, driving a tank was attacked and he and his crew wounded and taken prisoner. A reporter for Time, Dean Bretis reported having seen several Israeli soldiers paraded through Damascus, with their tank.

He saw them last outside the headquarters of the Defense Brigade Commandos headed by Rifaat al-Assad, brother of Bashar al-Assad, president of the current regime, notorious for his butchery of Syrian Sunnis, for chemical attacks and barrel bombs, the death of an estimated half-million people.
Baumel's tank commander and another captive were released in an exchange with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command working with the Syrian government; two terrorist entities with much in common.

Russia, which had entered the long-running Syrian civil war at a time when it appeared the rebellion was moving in the favour of the Syrian opposition, changed the course and the outcome of the war with Moscow's support of the Syrian regime. The Kremlin, eager to re-establish its reputation and presence in the Middle East, angled for an air base and a deep-water port in Syria in exchange for its air cover for Syrian and Hezbollah troops fighting the rebels.

It was long rumoured that the missing Israelis had been buried in the Yarmouk refugee camp for Palestinians, outside the Syrian capital. Palestinians living there had been receiving calls and text messages believed to emanate from Israeli intelligence, offering rewards for any information leading to the retrieval of the corpses. Where the bodies were interred in the cemetery was known by senior members of the PFLP-GC and Fatah.

Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu and Russian President Vladimir Putin enjoy a fairly robust relationship of mutual trust and agreement and Netanyahu appealed to Putin  to help find and return the Israeli military corpses. By this time the camp and its environs were under control of Syrian rebels and the Palestinian groups battling the Assad government forces. "They were digging between the tombstones for quite a while", reported one camp resident in anonymity.

It transpired that Russia launched an operation of its own into Islamic State territory -- for the geography had in turn morphed into an ISIL-held area -- with the intention of a lightning-raid action that would retrieve the Israeli bodies, using specific co-ordinates supplied by Israeli intelligence. The action failed to materialize the anticipated result; instead Russian troops came under fire, with a Russian special forces soldier injured.

In the end, though, Operation Bittersweet Song eventually succeeded in Russia acquiring Baumel's remains and returning them to Israel where he was laid to rest in a military funeral in April that took place in Jerusalem. The Fatah party denied revealing information, as did the senior commander in Yarmouk of its rival PFLP-GC group.