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Israeli Defense Minister Blames UN Over Videotape Issue
Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer on Tuesday blamed the United Nations for refusing to hand over to Israel a videotape filmed after the kidnapping of three Israeli soldiers by Lebanese resistance group Hezbollah last October.
"The United Nations is cooperating or operating under the threatening hand of Hezbollah and that's just not right," Ben Eliezer told Israeli Army Radio, adding that "the frustration is great."
This was the second time that Ben Eliezer expressed his dissatisfaction over the videotape issue with the U.N., which reiterated again on Monday its refusal to hand over to Israel the unedited videotape that the Jewish state believes may shed light on the kidnapping.
Last Friday, Ben Eliezer wrote to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, blaming the U.N. for yielding to the pressure of Hezbollah in releasing the videotape to Israel.
The videotape in question was filmed by Indian peacekeepers 18 hours after three Israeli soldiers were kidnapped on October 7 in the disputed Shebaa Farms on the Israeli-Lebanese-Syrian borders.
The tape is alleged to show vehicles abandoned by the kidnappers and the scene that a group of Lebanese on site forcibly took away the vehicles from the peacekeepers.
After keeping denying the existence of the tape for months, U.N. officials acknowledged last week that it has the tape and would allow Israel to view the tape with the faces of non-U.N. personnel edited out, due to security considerations and neutrality of the peacekeeping forces in Lebanon.
The U.N. is coming under intense pressure from Israel and the families of the kidnapped soldiers to hand over the unedited tape.
Hezbollah, or Party of God, said on Monday that giving the unedited tape to Israel would be tantamount to providing intelligence information to Lebanese enemy.
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