COLUMN ONE : Palestinian MIAs: Hope Fades Again : Weary families thought the peace process might help them learn the fate of their men. Israel publicized secret cemeteries, pledged new help. But now the bitter waiting game has resumed.

These are the unknown soldiers in the battle for Palestine: Their graves lie covered by shifting sheets of grass under a wide sky. Their tombstones are four-digit numbers stenciled on haphazard rows of white signs.

“Cemetery for the Enemy’s Fallen,” says a hand-painted sign on a barbed-wire fence ringing the graveyard. And Rabbi Zion, who carefully tends the cemetery and makes sure its dead Muslims point southeast toward Mecca, wears a Jewish skullcap and the green fatigues of the Israel Defense Forces, or IDF.

“To my great regret, I know all of these cases. This is the job of an IDF rabbi,” Zion said, sighing as he stood among the graves on a recent afternoon while a jeep full of Israeli soldiers waited outside the fence.

Unlike the graves lovingly dug by families for the Palestinians who died last month in a Hebron mosque, no one visits these. Their location is secret, and the cemetery has no name, though it is popularly known as the “Cemetery for Trespassing Terrorists.” Its silent inhabitants are unknown, except to the Israeli army, which says these stark, stenciled numbers identify Palestinians who died trying to infiltrate Israel’s borders or commit acts of terrorism.

In a small hilltop village miles from this windy graveyard, Badriyya Abdullah Sabah on Jan. 19 received official notice that her brother, Bassam, missing since 1984, is buried beneath the white sign that has 5028 stenciled on it.

Though the army has denied family requests to visit, the notice was the first indication of Bassam’s whereabouts after nearly a decade of anxious searching, of visiting hospitals and prisons and filing requests for the return of his body, if he was indeed dead.

“The army’s answer was always ‘No, there’s no body,’ ” Sabah said. “Now, how do I know if this notice is correct? I told the lawyer, if he’s dead, let us go and visit the graveyard. I want to know 100% that this is the case, so I can rest my mind. But it seems this is impossible.”

Long after Palestinians and Israelis sort out the problems of the living, long after the delayed peace negotiations get back on track, the fate of these dead men and hundreds of other Palestinians who disappeared in Israel and its occupied territories will remain a stumbling block to any lasting Arab-Israeli peace.

As Israel presses Syria and Lebanon for answers on six Israeli servicemen missing from the war in Lebanon, Arabs are raising their own case about missing Palestinians, some of whose families have searched for them since the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. At least 140, and possibly as many as 500, Palestinians are unaccounted for in nearly 27 years of recent conflict.

Reports about some of them have surfaced in mystifying fashion over the years: Someone’s husband was seen in the orthopedic ward of a hospital in Jerusalem; a brother was spotted in a prison by a friend; a maid carried a secondhand message from a man long presumed dead saying he was alive and well but imprisoned--all tantalizing details for which there is seldom any hard evidence.

Israeli officials say they have no official statistics on missing Palestinians and have for years given out information on those it knows about only in response to formal family requests submitted through the Red Cross.

Very few queries ever meet with a reply, and some families have unsuccessfully petitioned for information for years. But the army’s recent willingness to publicize its two secret cemeteries--the second is in northern Israel--and its pledge to return bodies to any family that claims them through the Red Cross have raised the prospect that the files of the Palestinian missing may, after nearly three decades, finally be closed.

“We heard there is a mission of the United States Congress to trace the Israeli missing, which are six persons. This mission should also be informed that there are also Palestinian missing. And they are not six persons. They are 140 or more,” said Issa Hamed, head of the Arab Society for Tracing Missing Persons.

“Now, after the peace process and the Oslo agreement, people are starting to talk more about the missing. Before, there was no hope for them. But they think the peace process might help them,” Hamed said. “It gives them hope that, after this long time, their suffering might be stopped.”

Other activists for the missing say they hope the fact that one of the cemeteries is near Jericho, the West Bank city that will come under Palestinian self-rule in coming months if the peace process stays in motion, may allow families to visit the graves there for the first time.

“We want to know if they are going to return the bodies to the families, to let the families bury them wherever they want to, and especially, if Jericho is going to be an independent area, is it a place where families can now visit freely? Are they going to let them have a place where they can go and cry?” asked Dalia Kerstein, director of the Hamoked Center for the Defense of the Individual, a Jewish organization that has helped many Palestinian families trace prisoners and missing relatives.

Israeli officials say any family that wishes to claim a body can do so through the Red Cross; so many go unclaimed, they say, because families may not wish to associate themselves with a known terrorist.

“Israel has always given information on requests from the ICRC and other organizations on a one-to-one basis. Those that had families in the territories who wanted to claim the terrorist were given the bodies,” said Lt. Col. Yehuda Weinraub, spokesman for the IDF. “Many people from the other side (in neighboring Jordan or Lebanon) don’t even request the information because in many countries, belonging to such subversive organizations or having family members who do is not well looked on.”

Indeed, Sabah was detained and questioned by Israeli security services for four days after asking about her brother’s whereabouts.

The Israelis said he and two associates were killed on Sept. 14, 1984, while trying to mount a cross-border terrorist operation from Jordan. What did she know about the incident? the officials asked.

Sabah wasn’t sure. Her brother, Bassam Abdullah Sabah Subih, had been living in Jordan because he had been denied permission to live in the family village of Mugheir near Ramallah. Sabah began inquiring about him when she read in a Jordanian newspaper that he had been killed while trying to cross into the West Bank from Jordan.

Another brother came in from Kuwait and began asking questions of his own. As recently as December, he learned, someone claimed to have seen Bassam in Jerusalem’s Hadassah Hospital.

Kerstein, who investigated the case, said the alleged witness has remained anonymous, fearful of coming forward:

“Bassam tells this anonymous person: ‘My family doesn’t know I’m alive. Let them know I’m alive. I’m here for medical reasons. I will soon be taken back to jail, where I am being held with 16 other persons. We never receive mail. We are never allowed visits. We supposedly don’t exist.’ ”

The army’s response to Kerstein’s inquiries was the notification that Bassam had been killed and was buried in the Jordan Valley cemetery.

But without access to the body itself--so far--questions remain.

“There is the possibility that they caught him alive, and he died later under torture. When they keep the body, it’s easy for them to say he was killed in an operation,” said Issa Hamed, whose organization is also investigating the case.

Kerstein is inquiring about another body at the Jordan Valley cemetery, allegedly that of a Palestinian man killed in a clash on Israel’s northern border with Lebanon in 1991. She has produced an affidavit from a witness who claims to have seen the man shortly after his disappearance in a prison service hospital at Ramle. Another witness swore in an affidavit that he had received a letter from the man, written from prison.

In response, the army said the man is indeed dead.

“We were given photographs--terrible, terrible photographs--of the three who were supposedly killed in the clash and buried,” Kerstein said. “The mother who came to us is a Palestinian from Jordan. We contacted her, she came to the bridge (linking the West Bank and Jordan), she was asked to identify her son from the photographs. She couldn’t identify him. It was unrecognizable.”

Now, the army has agreed to open the grave where the man is supposedly buried and take a tissue sample that will be compared to the blood of the mother and her husband.

Such cases have many families asking whether Israel is holding unidentified Palestinian prisoners for possible future exchanges.

Reto Meister, chief of the Red Cross delegation in Israel, said that while there are Lebanese detainees in Israel to which the organization has no access, there has been no evidence of Palestinians from the occupied territories being detained without record.

Among Israel’s known Lebanese prisoners is Shiite cleric Sheik Abdel Karim Obeid, kidnaped from his home in southern Lebanon by Israeli commandos in 1989 as a possible hostage to exchange for missing Israeli airman Ron Arad.

Arad, a captain and navigator shot down over Lebanon during a bombing raid in October, 1986, is the only one of the six missing Israelis for whom there is some hope that he might be alive.

“For many years, Israel has had the procedure of handing over the bodies of killed Palestinians to their families,” Meister said. “In recent cases, to our knowledge, there are no corpses that have been buried without notification to the family by Israeli authorities.”

Many Palestinian families, like the relatives of those missing in war anywhere, refuse to give up hope that somewhere, their loved one is alive.

Fowaz Abed Youssef Hamad, now 32, was only 6 during the Six-Day War of 1967 when his father, a builder, left the family home in East Jerusalem to buy milk on the third day of the war.

Neighbors said later that Israeli forces had come into the neighborhood, there had been a clash, and Hamad’s father, Abed Youssef Hamad, had been shot in both legs. He was taken away in a truck of wounded people, witnesses said.

A few days later, relatives of the family in Ramallah were contacted by the Israeli army, who told them that they could pick up Hamad from the Russian Compound jail in Jerusalem. But when the family went to get him, he was not there.

About three months later, some Jordanian soldiers visited the family and said Hamad had been in the hospital in Ramallah but had been taken by the Israeli army to another location. But they said they did not know where.

There was no further word until 1990, when an Arab cleaning woman who works at the Alyn Hospital for the Handicapped in Jerusalem spoke to one of the family’s neighbors.

“She said there was a man in the hospital by the name of our father,” Fowaz said. “He asked her to go and tell his wife that he was there. He gave her the names of his children--our names. And the cleaning woman had many details. She knew that my mother’s brother is a barber. She knew many things about our family no one else would know.”

The family went to the hospital, but they were turned away at the reception desk. The Red Cross followed up, according to the family, but received no indication that Hamad had been there.

Desperate, one of Fowaz’s uncles, who works as a garbage collector for the city of Jerusalem, asked a Jewish co-worker to take a photograph of Hamad into the hospital.

“He talked to an Arab patient who was handicapped, and he asked him how long he had been there. He said, ‘Since the ’67 war,’ ” Fowaz recounted. “He showed him the picture and said, ‘Do you know this man?’ He said, ‘Yes, he’s inside.’ So the Jewish man wanted to go and look for him, but a soldier caught him and said, ‘What are you doing?’ He said, ‘I have work in there.’ But the soldier said, ‘No, your work is outside.’ ”

Again, the family gave up until a year ago, when they went back to the Red Cross, which did a computer search of the names of all known prisoners. Hamad’s name wasn’t among them.

“The Red Cross says for sure he must be dead,” Fowaz said. “They tell us: ‘Why would you think he’s in the hospital out there? Why would the Israelis even want him? He wasn’t a soldier in the ’67 war.’ But me, I believe he’s still alive. My opinion is they don’t want to release him because then he is going to start talking about what happened to him. And people would start to realize that there are other people like my father.”

To this faint hope Fowaz clings, as do his sister, an elementary-school teacher who was only a baby when Hamad disappeared, and Hamad’s wife, who is still dressed in black, as she has been every day since her husband left to buy milk 27 years ago.

“We read in the newspapers that there are 500 families like this, who don’t have answers,” Fowaz said. “I want to forget, but I can’t. I have to keep looking for him. If I know he’s really dead, then I won’t go on looking for him anymore.”

Issa Hamed of the Arab Society for Tracing Missing Persons said that opening the files on those buried in the secret cemeteries might be the first step in determining the fate of the missing. Families want records not only of who has died, he said, but of when and how.

His own brother, Abdel Nasser Hamed, disappeared when Israeli forces on April 28, 1985, thwarted a navy operation by Fatah--the dominant wing of the Palestine Liberation Organization--aimed at killing Israel’s defense minister. Hamed met with eight Palestinian prisoners who survived the operation and who said his brother had safely jumped off their ship after it was hit by Israeli missiles.

The Israelis picked up all survivors and took them to prison, but kept them apart for 101 days. No one saw Hamed after that, but Issa Hamed believes it is possible that his brother is being held for exchange. Israeli authorities deny this; they say the Red Cross has contacted all survivors.

Hamed said full details about those buried in the secret cemeteries, not just responses to individual inquiries from the Red Cross, may help resolve doubts like his.

“The Geneva Convention says you have to send the family a death certificate,” he said, “including all the information about the place of death, the date of death, the reason of death. Place of burial, date of burial. And none of this has been complied with.”