WASHINGTON — The mother of American journalist Austin Tice, who has been detained in Syria for more than 12 years, reiterated her call Monday for the Israeli military to pause strikes in a part of Syria where her son may be held.
“I think it would be polite, to say the least, that perhaps they’re not bombing while people are trying to clear the prisons,” Debra Tice told reporters Monday afternoon outside the Syrian Embassy in Washington.
That call comes days after she made the same appeal in a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In a letter dated Dec. 14, Debra Tice told the Israeli leader her family has “credible information” that her son may be held in a prison outside the Syrian capital, Damascus, and urged the Israeli military to pause strikes in the area to allow rescuers to search the site.
“We are aware that your military has an active campaign in the area, preventing rescuers from approaching and accessing the prison facility,” she wrote in the letter, which The New York Times published Monday.
The Israeli military has been bombing weapons depots and air defenses in Syria. Israel says it wants to keep military equipment away from extremists.
In the letter, Debra Tice said her son may be held in a prison under a Syrian military museum in the mountainous Mount Qasioun area. The prison was connected by a tunnel to a neighborhood and a government palace, she added in the letter.
“We have no way of knowing if the prisoners there have food and water. We urgently request you pause strikes on this area and deploy Israeli assets to search for Austin Tice and other prisoners. Time is of the essence,” she said.
The Israeli Foreign Ministry did not immediately reply to VOA’s email requesting comment.
But Gal Hirsch, the Israeli government’s lead envoy for hostage affairs, told The Times that he had received the letter and was coordinating with U.S. officials.
“We will do everything possible in assisting the United States of America to bring the hostages and missing persons back home,” Hirsch said.
A Texas native and former U.S. Marine, Austin Tice has been held in Syria since 2012, when he was detained at a checkpoint in Damascus. Aside from a brief video after his capture, little has been heard or seen of him since.
Earlier in December, before the Bashar al-Assad government fell, the Tice family revealed it had obtained information vetted by the U.S. government that confirmed Austin Tice was still alive and detained in the Damascus area.
Since Syrian rebels, led by the Islamist militant group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), took Damascus and toppled Assad’s government on December 8, thousands of prisoners have been released from prisons run by the now-deposed government.
The release of those prisoners has raised hope in the Tice family that Austin will be among them.
“I feel like we’re standing in line, and we’re not the only ones that are still standing in line,” Debra Tice told reporters Monday. “It’s going to take a while.”
Austin Tice is an award-winning freelance journalist and photographer who works for outlets that include The Washington Post, CBS and McClatchy. He is the longest-held American journalist abroad.
U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told reporters Monday that the
United States has communicated with HTS on the importance of locating Austin Tice, but that there are no U.S. government personnel on the ground in Syria looking for the journalist.
“We have a number of people engaged on trying to find Austin Tice and bring him home, and we communicated directly to HTS that anything that they could do to help us find him, we would greatly appreciate,” Miller said.
Syria’s transitional government said last week that the search for Austin Tice is ongoing, and that it would cooperate with the U.S. government in finding Americans who were disappeared by the former Assad government.
Outside the Syrian Embassy in Washington, which the U.S. government forced to close in 2014 but may now reopen soon, Debra Tice told reporters she has never lost hope that her son will return home.
“I’ve always had hope. I’ve never had even a millisecond of hopelessness,” she said. “We just need to get all those prisons opened, get all those families reunited, including us.”
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