Al Jazeera aired footage taken of two IDF POW”s who were captured and held captive in Syria, one segment in a three part documentary called “Exchange” which portrays all of Israel’s prisoner swap deals since 1978. The station claims that in the series it will reveal footage and information never heard or seen before, and the producer says the next episode will deal with IDF soldier Gilad Shalit. It is not clear why the station chose to release the footage after so many years.
The footage shown on Israeli television channels Thursday night showed interviews carried out with IDF soldiers Yosef Groff and Nissim Salam (Shalem) in 1983, when they were held in solitary confinement in Syria, after they were captured by the Palestine Liberation Front in Lebanon a year earlier.
The two are interviewed by an officer who headed the operations division called Abu Ali. The soldiers were asked separately to give their opinion in Hebrew, on the massacre at the Palestinian refugee camp in Sabra and Shatilla, as well as on other issues.
The episode later showed the wrecked house where IDF soldier Nachshon Wachsman was held by Hamas in 1994 that was destroyed after it blew up. Wachsman was killed by his captors as IDF forces launched an operation to rescue him.
In an interview on Channel 2 after viewing the footage, Shalem said he had been coerced to make the statements. The film segment showed Shalem comparing the actions in the refugee camp to those of the Nazis and Hitler. “They put me in rooms with all kinds of films for two days….I told them it wasn’t us, that IDF soldiers would not do such a thing….you can’t come out a hero when you are held in such conditions,” he said.
Groff,was shown on the screen, tearfully commenting on the massacre footage shown to him, saying “it looks very bad..very bad….. The world will learn quickly of the dimensions of the massacre at Sabra and Shatila, and because the PLO's weapons were no longer there, the question of why so many were killed will also come up."
Groff and Shalem were returned to Israel in May 1985 along with IDF soldier Hezi Shai in what was known as the Jibril deal, named after the PLF leader Ahmad Jibril. Israel agreed to release 1,150 prisoners. Among the prisoners released was Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin who later established the movement and Jibril Rajoub who became West Bank security chief during Yasser Arafat’s tenure.
Among the prisoners released abroad was Japanese terrorist Kozo Okamoto,who launched an attack at Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport.
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