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Israeli prfsdners atrocity victims
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Compiled from Dispatches
JRAELI PRISONERS OF WAR being displayed for photographers by their Arab captors. Picture ^s released last week in Israel to relatives trying desperately to recognize missing sons and husbands.
The New York Post this week reported that soldiers recapturing Syrian territory found the bodies of Israeli soldiers wrapped in Tephillin, shot and stuffed inside an Aron Hakodesh (Ark for Torah scrolls).
Israel's leading independent daily newspaper HaAretz last weekend quoted a report by General Yitzhak Hofi, commander of Israeli forces on the Syrian forces to the effect that:
"In two places the bodies of soldiers were found. Their hands were tied and their eyes covered. They were shot through the head. In another location Israeli captives were shot after they had surrendered and a wounded Israeli officer who had difficulty walking was killed.
documents and photographs
were also released in Tel Aviv this week showing 12 bound Israeli soldiers shot to death by retreating Syrians on the Golan Heights front. The photos have been handed to the International Committee of the Red Cross, an Israeli military sopkesman said.
Col. Nahman Karni confirmed reports that advancing Israeli troops had discovered the bodies of their conrades, bound hand and foot under a pile of stones and brush in the Khushiya area of the Golan.
They had apparently been captured during the first advance of the Syrians at the beginning of the war and killed as the Syrians withdrew in face of an Israeli counter-offensive, Karni said.
(See also page seven)
kBBAT SHALOM, FRI., NOV. 9, 1973—CHESHVAN 14, 5734
ISRAEL BRIEFS
Vol. XL, No. 43 <=^p $10.00 per year, this issue 25c
URGE HELP FOR POWs
Jews and non-Jevy^s here were urged this week to protest the UN and International Red Cross the refusal by Syria and kypt -to release names ol all Israeli prisoners of war. Thous-. [ds of circulars were distributed by the C.I.C. stressing the id. to virrite^to Ottawa to use its good offices with the Red )ss and UN to end "the uiitold suffering and anguish of )thers and wives who believe that their loved ones are dead."
The Canada-Israel Committee, Pacific Region, disclosed (at Syria has not given a single name to the Red Cross and ^pt is delaying information, grave breaches of the Geneva |)nvention.
C.I.C. chairman, Samuel Kaplan, urged Bulletin readers help end the suffering of Israeli families by writing to MPs, Cross and UN on this matter.
Reports provide basis of anxiety for Israel POWs
BY GABRIEL KEY
ntest report Egypt ising nuclear Scuds
SW YORK—Two brigades of let Scud surface-to-surface siles, each equipped with a [ear war-head, are in position of Cairo poised to strike . Aviv and other Israel cities, j authoritative magazine Avi-|r Week and Space Technology
Is*
|he magazine says in its cur-edition that the single-stage l-able-prppellent Scud missiles |e sent to Egypt from a Soviet ck Sea port last Sept. 12, lost a month before the Oct. rab attack on Israel, lowever experts in London seriously reports that the |iet Union has equipped the E)tians with large numbers of surface-to-surface missiles |ing the last several months that these weapons, operated I Soviet crews, would be used
Iny new offensive. .......___
lut they dismiss entirely the lort in the American magazine |ch said the missiles are eq-3ed with nuclear warheads, fhe analysts acknowledge that missies can be equipped with iier conventional or atomic jrges but they contend that Illy-reliable independent intel-I'nce reports show no nuclear rheads have been procured.
The Scud-a NATO codename for the missile - comes in two types. The newer version, initially produced in 1965, has a range of roughly 185 miles, is fired from a launcher mounted on a truck and may be guided electronically.
CAPTURE RUSSIANS
LONDON — The Sunday Observer says seven Russian soldiers in uniform were captured by the Israelis on the„ Syrian front during the first week of the Middle East war.
The newspaper says the Russians surrendered when the Israelis overran their bunker in the first line of Syrian defences on the Golan Heights.
The Observer says the affair is being treated with strictest secrecy by- Israeli authorities. It reported the Russians were interrogated at the Israeli air force base at Ramat David in Galilee. The newspaper did not identify its sources.
JERUSALEM — Behind Israeli fury over the deliberate refusal of Egypt and Syria to account for the 450 missing Israeli soldiers and airmen, presumed to be in Arab captivity, lies a grave anxiety based upon past and also most recent experience.
The Syrians and Iraqis especially have a record of brutal treatment of Jewish captives, while the Egyptians are still holding 10 Israelis who were taken prisoner in the late President Nasser's "war of attrition" which lasted from the spring until the summer of 1970.
(One was just released this week unexpectedly — The Editor.)
Indeed, so grave is the fear of what may have happened to Israeli prisoners of the present war that military censorship prevented foreign (or Israeli) correspondents reporting on atrocities already coinmitted "to avoid unnecessary suffering to the families of missing men."
It was only upon his return to London that Max Hastings, the Evening Standard's correspondent in Israel, could report (last Friday) what he had seen on the Syrian front.
(See Hasting's report on page seven.)
In his remarkable account he wrote; "The sight of the Western Powers attempting to appease the Arabs' genocide ambitions has seemed to me one of the most humiliating of my short life. Admittedly, a part of my own difficulty in seeing this issue coldly is the memory of meeting an Israeli captain in Syria in a distressed state because his company had just found a group of Israeli prisoners left behind by the Syrians. They had been bound, hideously tortured and then shot
by the retreating Syrians."
There have been other accounts of similar savagery by the Syrians who are believed to be holding some 120 of the missing men and of whom nothing at all has been heard or seen so far.
It is therefore not surprising that the whole of Israel — and her friends abroad — have been so worried and outraged by the
(Continued on Page 3) See: ANXIETY
FRENCH EMBARGO
HAIFA — German and French manufacturers of medical equipment refused to sell their products to European customers when they learned equipment was intended for Israel, reported Rambam Society.
* * *
TIES SEVERED
JERUSALEM — West African states of Gabon and Sierra Leone broke relations with Israel, the 23rd and 24th nations in Africa to do so.
* ♦ *
16,200 RETURN
JERUSALEM — Some 16,200 Israelis returned home from abroad during the war, over 8,000 of them during first week. Some 4,000 Israelis left the country during war, Central Bureau of
Statistics reported.
* * *
BURY SYRIANS
GOLAN HEIGHTS - Israeli burial parties are ideniifying bodies of Syrian soldiers killed on northern front and burying them in military cemeteries here.
NEMETZ APPOINTED CHIEF JUSTICE
JWB Staff
The Honorable Mr. Justice Nathaniel Theodore Nemetz has assumed duties as British Columbia Supreme Court Chief Justice following announcement of his appointment last week by Prime Minister Trudeau in Ottawa.
Mr. Justice Nemetz, 60, now a judge of the B.C. Appeal Court, succeeds Chief Justice J. 0. Wilson who has reached the mandatory retirement age of 75.
Mr. Justice Nemetz's appointment represents a continuation of a record of significant firsts which he has achieved as a member of the province's Jewish community.
One of the first Jewish persons named a King's Council (in 1950), he was the first Jew named B.C. Supreme Court Justice. In 1968 he was the first Jew elevated to the Court of Appeal of B.C. Additionally, Mr. Justice Nemetz has been most active at the University of British Columbia: he was the first Jewish member of the Board of Governors and Senate and served as chairman of the
latter body from 1969 to 1S72.
Last year he became the first Jew to serve as U.B.C. Chancellor, a three-year elected post.
He was president of the U.B.C. Alumni Association in 1956-57, (Continued on Page 12) See: NEMETZ
MR. JUSTICE NATHAN NEMETZ . . .new elevation