The United Nations said Friday it would give the governments of Israel and Lebanon a video filmed the day after three Israeli soldiers were abducted by the Lebanese Hizbollah movement, but will first alter the tape to obscure faces of presumed members of the group, said reports.
The move, which a UN official said was intended to protect UN troops in southern Lebanon, was likely to draw ire from Hizbollah and the Israelis, and comes after a series of blunders in UN handling of the sensitive footage.
Announcing the decision Friday, Jean-Marie Guehenno, undersecretary general for peacekeeping, said the United Nations was handing over the tape out of concern for the soldiers' families, said AFP.
"In our view, nothing on that tape sheds light on the circumstances of the abduction or on the conditions of the abductees," he said.
The 30-minute video, filmed October 7 in southern Lebanon, shows two abandoned all-terrain vehicles, their contents, efforts by UN troops to remove them and their interception by a group of armed men, "allegedly from the Hizbollah," Guehenno said.
The video also shows "very small blood stains" in the vehicles, though it is impossible to tell whether the blood came from the soldiers or their kidnappers, as well as false UN license plates, false antennas and two UN uniforms, Guehenno said.
He said all those details were communicated to Israel on October 11.
The kidnapping took place October 6 in the Israeli-occupied Shabaa Farms border territory.
But the United Nations officially admitted to the existence of the videotape only on Thursday, after Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer sent a letter to the United Nations asking for it.
Guehenno firmly denied suggestions that the UN kept quiet about the tape for fear of reprisals by Hizbollah against UN troops deployed in southern Lebanon, said the agency.
"We are not covering up anything, from the outset. We are covering the faces because we have to protect the security of our people," Guehenno said at a news conference.
But Guehenno could not explain a series of errors in the UN chain of command, which led high officials of the organization to mislead the Israeli government, insisting since March that it had no additional information on the incident.
Guehenno said he himself only learned of the existence of the tape on June 6 after General Seth Kofi Obeng, commander of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) brought it to New York in May.
Three weeks later, on June 27, the UN's special coordinator for the Middle East, Terje Roed-Larsen, and its special representative for south Lebanon, Staffan de Mistura, denied the existence of the tape while communicating with the Israeli defense minister.
After learning that Larsen "involuntarily" misled Eliezer, Guehenno called Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, Yehuda Lancry, to stress that the United Nations wanted to maintain "frank and open" relations with the Hebrew state.
Meanwhile, Israeli security sources said Friday that the video could be part of psychological warfare Hizbollah is waging against Israel, according to Haaretz newspaper.
The sources added that it was hard to believe that the pictures were taken without Hizbollah's consent.
Channel Two Television's news program broadcast further stills from the UN-filmed footage Friday, as well as other photographs that had reached Israel via Lebanese sources, who claimed that two of the three kidnapped soldiers appear in the photographs, supposedly taken at a Beirut hospital ten days after the kidnapping. The security services, however, are still unsure that the photographs really do show the soldiers.
Haim Avraham, the father of Benny Avraham, one of the three soldiers, said that he saw a similarity between his son and the soldiers in the photograph, but added that he could not say for certain that it was his son – Albawaba.com
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