Town grappling with soldier's kidnap and Hizbollah rockets

NAHARIA, Israel - Eighty-five-year-old Rosa Goldenberg, who lives next door to the family of Ehud Goldwasser, one of the two Israeli soldiers captured on the border with Lebanon this week, sums up her feelings. "I am heartbroken. He was an outstanding boy."

Goldenberg said she had attended the bar mitzvahs of Ehud, 31, and his two brothers. "He was a good friend of my grandson. I have just heard the news that they think he's alive, thank God."

This peaceful coastal town in the far north of Israel, with its tree-lined streets, ice cream parlours and long, quiet sandy beach, hardly feels like a war zone.

There is none of the destruction wrought in Gaza in the past fortnight. The two civilian deaths in the region yesterday are dwarfed by those in Lebanon.

True, the roads are unusually empty of traffic. But some of its coffee shops remain full and open, many of their patrons transfixed by the television news on what is happening here and to the north.

This is a town in shock for two reasons.

One is the discovery that one of their own,Goldwasser, a reservist who got married about a year ago, is one of the two captured soldiers. The second is the two big volleys of Katyusha rockets launched into the town by Hizbollah militants yesterday, one of them killing a woman as she sipped early-morning coffee on her balcony, are on a scale unknown for quarter of a century.

Yesterday you could hear the latest volley exploding close to the town's main hotel. Black smoke billowed upwards as the nearest landed a couple of blocks away.

The mangled balcony railings outside Monica Zeidman's top-floor modern flat, and the still uncleared debris and glass on the ground below, testified to the moment the Katyusha rocket struck.

Residents said the Argentinian-born Zeidman had not heeded the local police patrol's call to go into the secure room each flat contains, and had been toppled by the blast on to the balcony a floor below.

Danny Pincus, 27, who lives opposite, said he had heard the whoosh of the Katyusha before the explosion which killed his neighbour.

"There was [a rocket] about a year ago but we have had nothing like this since [the Lebanon war in] 1982. I have taken my wife and kids to my sister in Tel Aviv. If there's one more rocket I'm going to Tel Aviv too."

In the town's hospital, patients were yesterday being transferred to a new, hitherto unused, underground complex of wards designed for just such an eventuality.

The sense of normality overturned was underlined by one of the injured, Shimon Shechter, 43, who stopped at traffic lights while driving to his construction job.

"There were a few cars in front of me. Suddenly I hear a whistling noise and I thought it must be a Katyusha. There was a huge explosion and then I saw dark in my eyes. I looked down and saw that I was bleeding."

Shechter, who had a piece of shrapnel lodged in his sinus, added: "There is no easy solution but the Army have to push Hizbollah back as far as possible so that the range of the Katyushas is far from Israel.

"Until now I don't think they did enough to stop this happening but I think they will now."

Gershon Reuben, 46, another of Goldwasser's neighbours, insisted that Israel should not negotiate prisoner releases with the soldiers' militant captors in Gaza or Lebanon, not least for the bleak reason that he believed they were already dead.

"There is no point because bodies can't tell you anything."

But as Naharia braced itself for more Katyushas, Rosa Goldenberg was having none of this pessimism about the soldier's fate. "With the help of God alone, they will get him back. We can't leave him behind."

- INDEPENDENT