Centuries ago, the most accomplished and well known rabbi of his era, the "Maharam" of Rotenberg, was taken captive and held for ransom. When he found out how high a [monetary] ransom his captors were demanding, he instructed visitors to forbid the transaction. He argued that to give in to such blackmail will only open the door to further kidnappings and blackmail. He died in prison, and a wealthy man redeemed his body with a large cash gift (much smaller than the original demand). While this was only over financial issues, in the case of exchanges with terrorists many of those released from prison go back to killing Jews. In addition, terrorists plotting murder can rest assured that, without a legal death penalty in Israel, they too may very well be exchanged after a future kidnapping. This pattern is extremely dangerous to Israel. There can be no justification to exchange dead bodies for hundreds or thousands of terrorists.

It's very sad that even the staff of the Military Rabbinate appear to be quite unable to keep their mouths closed, even when dealing with questions of life and death. Since they are part of the IDF, I would expect those leaks to be investigated, and those responsible, punished.

And then make damn sure a mossad agent puts a bullet between his eyes in Beirut

I simply can't believe Israel launched a 34-day brutal war against Lebanon in summer 2006 and that Hizbullah retaliated by pounding almost all northern Israel hard with deadly rockets only to find out two years later that Israel neither succeeded in freeing its two kidnapped soldiers nor was able to destroy Hizbullah.Besides,the two missing soldiers for whose sake Israel waged the Second Lebanon War are now declared "killed in action" by Israel...! For what purpose was the Second Lebanon War ???

To Salim of Stalingrad, In case you didn't figure it out yet "the purpose of the war" was that Hizbollah, by crossing the Israeli border and kidnapping Israeli soldiers, in effect, declared war on Israel. Since we can't tolerate having depraved, primitive, brutal bloodthirsty killers on our northern border, the war was launched to try to get them the hell of of there and back to their dark stinking holes. That was the purpose of the war.