Seven years of uncertainty came to a merciful end on Thursday with the discovery of Majdi Halabi's remains. Alongside the tragedy experienced by the missing soldier's family, which had held out hope throughout the ordeal that their missing son would be found alive, the defense establishment let out a sigh of relief that the mystery of his disappearance was finally solved and another case of a missing soldier can be closed. The police investigation will certainly still try to determine whether Halabi committed suicide or was killed by a terrorist cell, and if there are any grains of truth in the various theories posited in recent months by incarcerated criminals perhaps looking to receive concessions to their jail terms in exchange for information about his whereabouts. The investigators' appraisal of the situation on Thursday was identical to their belief at the beginning of the affair, and throughout the years: Halabi, they claimed, died very soon after the time and very close to the location from where he went missing. Despite these assessments, the Israel Defense Forces continued throughout the years to categorize Halabi as missing and alive, largely due to the country's and IDF's ethos that hope cannot be abandoned, the search must go on, the investigation must continue, every stone must be turned until the mystery is completely solved. As part of this effort, every scrap of information, however minute, was examined and crosschecked before being discarded. For example, information that he was abducted and taken to Lebanon or Syria, often from the mouths of frauds attempting to peddle false information hoping to cash in on the large reward $10 million. Officials in the IDF and Mossad suspected that these informants were offering mere speculations, while some were known charlatans, and yet they still spared no effort to meticulously follow each lead, until yesterday when they were finally able to stop. The closing of the "Halabi file," one year after Gilad Shalit's return from five years in Hamas captivity, still leaves five IDF soldiers listed as missing: Air Force navigator Ron Arad, who this coming Tuesday will have been missing for 26 years since his plane went down and he was taken into captivity in Lebanon; Guy Hever, who has been missing since August 1997; and Zecharia Baumel, Yehuda Katz and Tzvi Feldman, who have been missing for 30 years since the battle at Sultan Yakoub during the Lebanon War. And despite the fact that even the biggest optimists are challenged to predict a good outcome for the five remaining missing soldiers (according to numerous accounts Baumel, Katz and Feldman were killed during the battle on June 11, 1982; the last sign of life from Ron Arad was received in May 1988; no reliable information regarding Hever's fate, from the moment he disappeared from his base, has ever been received), the IDF has not given up and is continuing to dig for information so that their files can also be closed. Such as with Majdi Halabi, the ending may not be less tragic, but it will provide a release for the families, for the army and for the nation from the trauma of a missing soldier. As Batya Arad, Ron's mother, said until the day she passed away, she always wished for one thing to know.
