Israeli hostage: Bargaining chip? Militants may seek prisoner swap

KEREM SHALOM, Israel — Yesterday's cross-border attack, in which two Israeli soldiers were killed, four were wounded and one was kidnapped certainly caught the troops unaware, but it was hardly a tactical surprise.

Capturing an Israeli soldier, although it rarely happens, has long been the ultimate goal of extremist Palestinian groups, and Israeli soldiers are drilled to prepare for the possibility.

"They would rather capture you than kill you . . . hoping to trade you for Palestinian prisoners. . . . We were expecting this," said Marius Dreyer, 20, a South African-born Israeli soldier who was on home leave visiting his parents at this 20-family kibbutz near the Gaza Strip when he heard shooting and explosions coming from the 75-foot-high Israeli military watchtower just a few hundred yards behind his house.

Although Dreyer usually locks his army-issued M-16 rifle in a gun safe at the house, yesterday - in the wake of the attack - the weapon lay at his feet as he sat under an awning in a plastic garden chair.

Following a tense search of the kibbutz for possible Palestinian infiltrators after the attack, most residents remained indoors.

While Israel's political-security cabinet immediately approved plans for a military response, the leaders reportedly decided to hold off launching a counterstrike, at least for now, in order to work through diplomatic channels to try to free the kidnapped soldier, 19-year-old Gilad Shalit.

In 1994, when Cpl. Nachshon Waxman, a 19-year-old Israeli-American, was kidnapped while hitchhiking in Israel by Hamas militants, Israeli forces tracked him to a house in the West Bank and stormed it instead of negotiating. Waxman and two of his captors were killed in the battle.

The logic behind kidnapping a soldier is to use him, dead or alive, as a bargaining chip. Israel has been known to release hundreds of Arab prisoners held in its jails in exchange for the return of even one soldier's remains.

While opting to move cautiously to free Shalit, Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz left little doubt about how quickly the situation could devolve if he were tortured or killed. "Anyone who causes the soldier to be harmed should know that the soldier's blood is on his head" and that Israel will "exact a painful price," Peretz told reporters in Tel Aviv.