ISRAEL'S cabinet agreed yesterday to a deal with Lebanon's Shiite fundamentalist Hezbollah group, in which it will set free a man serving multiple life sentences in exchange for the remains of two Israeli soldiers.
The decision was immediately claimed as a victory by Hezbollah as a fulfilment of its promise to free Samir Kantar, sentenced in 1980 to 542 years in prison for an attack in the northern Israeli town of Nahariya.
The 22-3 cabinet vote in favour
of the deal came amid a debate among Israelis over whether or not to trade prisoners for corpses – many argue that the state must do all it can to retrieve soldiers who go into battle.
Gideon Ezra, the environment minister, said: "I knew there would be celebrating in Lebanon but our first obligation is to the families of the kidnapped and the soldiers who went into battle and will go into battle."
Retrieving the two seized soldiers, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, captured during a Hezbollah cross-border raid, was one of the stated aims of Israel's devastating military campaign in Lebanon in 2006. But prime minister Ehud Olmert announced during the cabinet meeting what had long been feared: that the two soldiers were dead, killed during the raid or shortly thereafter.
Israeli media said the soldiers' bodies would be sent to Germany, which mediated the swap, and identified by Israeli officials before Kantar is released. He is to be freed, along with four Hezbollah fighters; a dozen corpses, most of them of Hezbollah militiamen, will also be repatriated.
Witnesses said that during the 1979 Nahariya attack, Kantar, then 16, shot dead a young Israeli father, Danny Haran, in front of his four-year-old daughter, then smashed her skull against a rock with his rifle butt, killing her too. Her two-year-old sister was accidentally smothered to death while her mother tried to keep her quiet so that Kantar would not discover them.
Over the years, the mother, Smadar Haran Kaiser, has bitterly opposed Kantar's release but yesterday she voiced understanding for the deal: "The despicable murderer Kantar was never my own personal prisoner but the state's prisoner. Even if my soul should be torn and it is torn, my heart is whole."
But Yossi Beilin, an opposition member of parliament from the Meretz party, said: "If Israel releases prisoners … in exchange for corpses, it will signal to our enemies that preserving the lives of our prisoners is not the most important thing, since even if they are dead Israel will pay a price (to retrieve them]. Our enemies must know that they must completely safeguard our prisoners because only in exchange for live prisoners will they get something real."
Hashem Safieddine, the Hezbollah executive council chief, said Israel's decision to free Kantar "is a proof the word of the resistance is the most faithful, strongest and supreme". Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has long vowed to free Kantar and it was expected that a success would be seen as confirmation of the view that armed struggle is the way to deal with Israel.
Israel is now negotiating with Hamas over a deal to release Sergeant Gilad Shalit, who was seized in a cross-border raid from Gaza into Israel in 2006.
The full article contains 564 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
