Soldier's photo has Israel rapt

JERUSALEM - Israelis pored yesterday over every detail of 20-year-old pictures just received of their most famous missing soldier - his injured arm held close, the length of his beard, and the Arabic writing on a wall in the background.

Israeli airman Ron Arad was captured in Lebanon in October 1986, and his fate has since gripped the nation and become one of the great mysteries of the last generation. Over the weekend, the Lebanese guerrilla group Hezbollah transferred photographs, diary excerpts, and an 80-page report to Israel as part of a prisoner swap planned for tomorrow.

Hezbollah contends in the report that Arad is dead, but it only partly explains the circumstances surrounding his death, according to Israeli officials.

Tomorrow, Israel will free five Lebanese, including the perpetrator of one of the most notorious attacks in Israeli history. In exchange, Hezbollah will return two soldiers it captured in a border raid that sparked the 2006 war. Israel believes those soldiers are dead.

For many in Israel, the centerpiece of the swap will be the return of the two soldiers. But yesterday, it was the images of Arad that captured Israelis' imagination.

His story is well-known. Arad was a 28-year-old navigator when he was forced to parachute out of his fighter jet on a mission over Lebanon after one of the plane's bombs apparently malfunctioned. Israeli forces rescued the jet's pilot, but Arad was seized by guerrillas from the Shiite Amal organization.

A letter from Arad was later delivered to his family, and a videotaped message he recorded in the late 1980s was released several years ago. He has not been heard from since.

The latest report contains two pictures and parts of a diary Arad kept in the 1980s. Security officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because the material has not been made public, said the items had only "sentimental value" and did not shed light on his fate.

An Israeli official traveling with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in Paris said Olmert called the report "absolutely unsatisfactory." The official also spoke on condition of anonymity.

It remains unclear what happened to Arad. Hezbollah says he is dead but claims not to know exactly how he died.

Yet Israelis were gripped by the images of the bewildered-looking young man with his left arm tucked inside his shirt, staring at them yesterday from the front page of every major newspaper.

"These pictures only show that he was held prisoner and he was not treated well," Rami Eigra, a former official in the Mossad intelligence service who was involved in the search for Arad, told Army Radio. "The second thing it shows, and this was known, was that Ron was apparently injured when he ejected from the airplane."

Security officials who saw the report said Hezbollah claimed that Arad was killed May 4, 1988, during an Israeli raid on a village in southern Lebanon. Arad was apparently held in a neighboring village and may have tried to flee, the report said, according to two officials from the Israeli army and a third from the intelligence services.

However, this account was not new to Israel intelligence, and officials said Hezbollah provided no new evidence of it.

Israel has been reluctant to declare Arad, who would now be 50, dead without conclusive evidence.

"When the last sign you have of someone is that he is alive, you can't declare him dead just because time has passed," said Nissim Yogev, a friend of Arad who has been involved in a campaign that has offered $10 million for information on him. "Interview me in another 50 years and I will be able to say that he has died of old age."