Hezbollah handed the bodies of two Israeli soldiers to the Red Cross Wednesday to be exchanged for Lebanese prisoners held by Israel in a deal viewed as a triumph by the Lebanese Shi'ite guerrilla group.
Many Israelis see it as a painful necessity, two years after the soldiers' capture sparked a 34-day war with Hezbollah that killed about 1,200 people in Lebanon and 159 Israelis.
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Two black coffins were unloaded from a Hezbollah vehicle at a UN peacekeeping base on the Israel-Lebanon border after a Hezbollah 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 to Israel. The Israeli army later said forensic teams had identified the cadavers as those of its missing men. Israeli generals visited Goldwasser and Regev families to notify them.
"The Israeli side will now hand over the great Arab mujahid (holy warrior) ... Samir Qantar and his companions to the ICRC," Safa said at the Naqoura border on the Mediterranean coast.
In a deal mediated by a UN-appointed German intelligence officer, Israel freed Qantar and four other prisoners said by Hezbollah to be the last Lebanese captives in Israel.
The swap will close a file that has motivated repeated Hezbollah attempts over the past quarter century to capture Israelis to use as bargaining counters.
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.
The fathers of the two Israelis soldiers spoke of their pain at watching television pictures of their sons' coffins.
"It is not easy to see this, although there was not much surprise to it. But ... confronting this reality was difficult, yes," Shlomo Goldwasser told Israel radio.
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Zvi Regev said on Army Radio: "It was a terrible thing to see, really terrible. I was always optimistic, and I hoped all the time that I would meet Eldad and hug him."
Hezbollah's Safa said Israel had later handed over via the ICRC the bodies of eight Hezbollah fighters slain in the 2006 war, and those of four Palestinians, including Dalal Mughrabi, a woman guerrilla who led a 1978 raid on Israel.
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The four were among the nearly 200 Arabs killed trying to attack Israel whose bodies are to be transferred to Lebanon as part of the exchange. Hezbollah will return the remains of Israeli soldiers killed in south Lebanon.
Israel is also to free scores of Palestinian prisoners at a later date as a gesture to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
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 fluttered across south Lebanon and on the coastal highway from Naqoura to Beirut. "Liberation of the captives: a new dawn for Lebanon and Palestine," a 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," said Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's spokesman Mark Regev.
Agencies
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