News that Hezbollah has a dog tag belonging to First Sergeant Ron Mashiach, 33, who was killed in the Second Lebanon War, has reopened wounds his family is struggling to heal.

Hezbollah Chairman Hassan Nasrallah has claimed his group has remains of Israel Defense Forces soldiers who fell in war, suggesting Mashiach's body was not buried whole. This has impacted the family, especially the fallen soldier's mother.

Mashiach died when his helicopter was downed by a Hezbollah missile. His mother, Rivka Mashiach, refused to look at the autopsy report she received from the army.

The news about Mashiach's dog tag, published in the Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar yesterday, did not change her mind.

"He was a beautiful boy, I don't want to read it," she said of the report. "Everything is written in it in a cold way, they analyze every detail, and that is too much. This is my son," she said.

She said her other two sons, Moti and Dov, read the report.

"I understood he was buried whole. They said that except for the dog tag, everything is fine."

Yesterday morning, an IDF officer arrived at the family's home in Holon and informed them of the report in the Lebanese media.

"All of a sudden, everything has been reawakened. The pain is always there, but now the wound is open again. It is hard to express such pain," the bereaved mother said.

She said that during the shiva, the traditional seven-day mourning period, she had thought a great deal about whether Ron was buried whole.

"They told me he was. When they told me this, I let the question be. A week ago I heard Nasrallah say for the first time that he has body parts and I prayed that this would not affect us, and that we would not have to relive what we went through a year and a half ago," she said.

"Nasrallah deals in blood, deals in body parts. This is the behavior of a monster. He is trying to hurt us as much as he can, it is part of his psychological warfare," the mother said.

Meanwhile, one of the soldiers who helped evacuate the dead from Mashiach's helicopter said he was sure the officer's body had been whole.

The bodies could not be identified because of the blaze that gutted the downed chopper, said Rafi, a reservist paratrooper. However, "we later saw pictures of the five killed in the incident, and Ron was a large man compared to the rest. That was the heaviest corpse we carried," he said.

Yoav Stern adds: A Lebanese paper yesterday published a report that claimed Hezbollah is demanding the release of all the Lebanese prisoners currently held in Israeli jails as part of a swap with Israel. The Lebanese Shi'ite group is also calling for the release of a large number of Palestinian and Arab prisoners held in Israel, asking that the IDF provide it with a map of Lebanon delineating the areas where it planted mines or struck with cluster bombs.