Hezbollah handed over the bodies of two Israeli soldiers to the Red Cross on Wednesday to be exchanged for Lebanese prisoners held by Israel.
The deal is viewed as a triumph by the Lebanese guerrilla group and as a painful necessity by many Israelis, two years after the soldiers’ capture sparked a 34-day war with Hezbollah that killed about 1,200 people in Lebanon and 159 Israelis.
Hezbollah’s al-Manar TV showed two black coffins being taken from a vehicle at the Israel-Lebanon border after Hezbollah security official Wafik Safa disclosed for the first time that army reservists Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev were dead.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) took the coffins and drove them into Israel. Safa later said DNA tests conducted by the ICRC had verified the identity of the soldiers. There was no immediate confirmation from the ICRC or Israel.
“We are now handing over the two imprisoned Israeli soldiers, who were captured by the Islamic resistance on July 12, 2006, to the ICRC,” Safa said at the border. “The Israeli side will now hand over the great Arab mujahid (holy warrior) … Samir Qantar and his companions to the ICRC.”
In a deal mediated by a U.N.-appointed German intelligence officer, Israel was to free Qantar and four other prisoners.
Qantar had been serving a life prison term for the deaths of four Israelis, including a four-year-old girl and her father, in a 1979 Palestinian guerrilla attack on an Israeli town.
Neighbors outside the Regev home wept at the news the two soldiers were dead. Fighting back tears, Shlomo Laniado, who served in their reserve unit, said on Israel’s Channel Two television: “It increases the motivation to protect this country and it shows us who we are dealing with.”
An ICRC truck later drove into Lebanon with the bodies of eight Hezbollah fighters killed during the 2006 war.Israel will also hand over the remains of nearly 200 Arabs killed trying to infiltrate northern Israel. Hezbollah will return the remains of Israeli soldiers killed in south Lebanon.
The deal also calls for Israel to release scores of Palestinian prisoners at a later date as a gesture to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
HEZBOLLAH READY TO CELEBRATE
Hezbollah has dubbed the exchange “Operation Radwan,” in honor of “Hajj Radwan,” or Imad Moughniyah, the group’s military commander who was assassinated in Syria in February.
Yellow Hezbollah flags and banners fluttered across south Lebanon and along the coastal highway from the border village of Naqoura to the capital, Beirut. “Liberation of the captives: a new dawn for Lebanon and Palestine,” one banner read.Israel denounced the planned festivities.
“Samir Qantar is a brutal murderer of children and anybody celebrating him as a hero is trampling on basic human decency,” Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s spokesman Mark Regev said.
For some Lebanese, the exchange demonstrated the futility of the devastating conflict with Israel two summers ago.”There shouldn’t have been a war in 2006. A lot of lives were lost,” said Rami Nasereddine, an 18-year-old student in downtown Beirut. “It’s good that the prisoner exchange is taking place. Israel should have done that two years ago.”
The Palestinian Islamist group Hamas said the prisoner swap would boost its position in demanding the release of hundreds of long-serving prisoners in exchange for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier captured two years ago near the Gaza Strip. “This is a great victory to the resistance and to Hezbollah and it is a festival for the Lebanese prisoners and their families,” Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri said.
Israeli President Shimon Peres set the prisoner swap in motion on Tuesday by pardoning Qantar, reviled in Israel for his role in the 1979 attack. Qantar, aged 17 at the time, has said the father was shot by Israeli soldiers who also wounded him, and that he doesn’t remember what happened to the girl.
Peres said he felt “bitter and unbearable pain” at the decision and that it “in no way constitutes forgiveness,” but that Israel was obliged to get its soldiers back.
Olmert had described Qantar as the last bargaining chip for word on Israeli airman Ron Arad, missing since he bailed out over Lebanon in 1986. Israel said a report supplied by Hezbollah on Arad as part of the swap had failed to clarify his fate.
Hezbollah has made Qantar’s freedom a central demand. Many in Lebanon believe Israel’s refusal to free Qantar earlier prompted Hezbollah’s cross-border raid that led to the 2006 war.
The other Lebanese prisoners being released were identified as Maher Qorani, Mohammad Srour, Hussein Suleiman and Khodr Zeidan. They were to receive a heroes’ welcome of fireworks and rallies in Lebanon, which declared a public holiday.
