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|  | Casket with Israeli remains returned at Lebanese border Photo: Doron Golan
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One brown casket
Why did Nasrallah unexpectedly decide to return body parts of IDF soldiers?
Ariela Ringel-Hoffman
There was also one well-sealed brown casket there, and a Red Cross representative who was running around from one side to the other and ended up facing the cameras with an embarrassed smile.
We didn’t know about the casket, she explained, and in any case we didn’t expect it, and now everyone is waiting for the bomb squad to take a look – the same thing the bomb squad does every time we get such casket.
They were also waiting for the IDF Northern Command rabbi, whose face could be seen through the car window a short time later, not really comprehending what’s going on and why he was called up all of a sudden. That was the final act of this delusional show.
Another small trick by Nasrallah, another loose end of that war that will soon mark its two-year anniversary, and ended in a way that did not allow the victors collect all the body parts of their dead soldiers. The same body parts that Nasrallah presented several months ago, seeking a suitable offer from Israel.
This is a story that has no end and converges into several surrealistic images from the border crossing on the Lebanon border for the sake of television networks worldwide.
Why did Nasrallah do it? What was going through his head, we wish to know. Is it possible that in the framework of the mediation efforts, one small detail was forgotten or disappeared on the way from side A to side B? That’s not impossible, according to professionals well familiar with such processes. Things like that happened before, they say.
Could it also be a last-moment Hizbullah initiative meant to portray the expulsion of convicted spy Nissim Nasser to Lebanon as part of some kind of deal? A Hizbullah effort to earn a little glory: There, in exchange for a few body parts we got back this brave spy. That’s also possible.
But perhaps something has changed within Nasrallah, a small change within that body parts trader whose offer was rejected here with disgust? It’s hard to know. Based on past experience, says an intelligence
officer, it’s hard to believe. Very hard even.
So perhaps it’s a signal, like the optimists wish to believe, a sign of the seriousness of his intentions with respect to the large deal being formulated?
And meanwhile, the brown casket was opened, examined, and taken to the Forensic Institute in Abu Kabir, for DNA testing - and for some families of the dead, this was again just the beginning.
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