PLO Says It Has Returned ID of a Missing Israeli Soldier

The Palestine Liberation Organization, seeking to salvage a peace agreement with Israel that is threatened by violence and growing political dissent, has delivered the military identification tags of an Israeli soldier missing in Lebanon since 1982, PLO sources said Wednesday.

PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat this week handed over an identification necklace belonging to Zacharia Bawmal, missing since a tank battle in eastern Lebanon 11 years ago, to a special envoy of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

PLO officials, who asked not to be identified, said they have confirmed that Bawmal is dead but that one of five other Israeli soldiers missing in Lebanon, air navigator Ron Arad, is “probably alive.” He is widely believed to be held by Iranian-backed radical Islamic organizations in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley or in Iran itself.

The PLO said it is attempting for the first time to make progress on determining the fate of the six men to help guarantee the success of the peace agreement, threatened in recent days by a widening wave of violence in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Negotiations in Cairo for implementing the accord, under which the Israeli army is to begin withdrawing from Gaza and the West Bank town of Jericho on Dec. 13, have also stalled on the issues of how large an area of Jericho will be transferred to Palestinian control and who will control border crossings into Jordan and Egypt.

In an attempt to break the deadlock, Jacques Neriah, a diplomatic adviser to Rabin, met in Tunis earlier this week with Arafat and Ahmed Tibi, an Israeli Arab who is the PLO chairman’s special adviser on Israel. During the meeting, Arafat handed over the military identification tags of the missing airman, and Neriah took them to Rabin in Brussels.

PLO officials hope the tags will provide evidence of their attempt to locate information about the missing military men, an issue Israel has raised in connection with PLO requests for the release of thousands of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.

A little more than a year ago, Ahmed Jibril, head of the radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, claimed he had a videotape of the missing Israeli airman, shot down in an air raid over Lebanon in 1986, proving that Arad was still alive. But he never produced the tape publicly.

Arafat has no control over Jibril’s radical breakaway faction, based in Damascus, Syria. Jibril has several times threatened to assassinate Arafat over his signing of the peace accord with Israel.

Iran has also opposed the peace accord, and the Tehran government is unlikely to cooperate in any attempts to placate Israel.