The leading pan-Arab newspaper, the London-based, Saudi-owned al-Sharq al-Awsat, reports today that Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, the two young Israeli soldiers taken hostage by the Hizbullah terror group last summer, have been transferred to Iran.

According to the report, the captives – who were seized by Hizbullah inside Israeli territory – were transferred to Iran shortly after their kidnapping in a special operation overseen by a senior Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander. (The Revolutionary Guards were recently declared a terrorist organization by the Bush administration.)

A source at the headquarters of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei told al-Sharq al-Awsat that the planned release of an Iranian intelligence officer, Kazem Darabi, who is being held in Germany, could be related to a possible deal regarding the captives.

But Ehud Goldwasser’s mother this morning dismissed the report as “spin”. “We hear these kind of things all the time. There is no corroborating evidence to these reports. It is part of the Iranian government’s psychological warfare,” she said.