Dominic Waghorn,
Middle East correspondent, in Lebanon

Israel and Hizbollah have begun the process of swapping captives – including one of the most notorious prisoners ever to serve in an Israeli jail.

 

Samir Kuntar is escorted from Hadarim prison in Israel ahead of the prisoner swap

Hizbollah has delivered the bodies of two kidnapped Israeli soldiers to Israeli authorities on the Lebanon border.

It is only now that Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev – whose kidnap sparked the 34-day Lebanon war in 2006 – are known for sure to be dead.

Israel had long said it believed them to have died in captivity but Hizbollah had always refused to confirm this.

In return, Hizbollah will walk away with five leading militants, including Samir Kuntar.

It is on the face of it a far from fair exchange, especially when you include the remains of another almost 200 dead fighters that Israel has agreed to hand over.

And even more so when you consider the crimes for which Samir Kuntar has been serving 542 years in jail.

He led a boat raid from Lebanon on a northern Israeli seaside town in 1979. His gang killed an Israeli soldier and then searched for hostages.

 

They entered the home of the Haran family and seized 28-year-old Danny Haran and his daughter Einat, aged four.

They took them to the beach and according to witnesses Kuntar shot Danny in front of his daughter as she begged him not to kill her father.

He then bludgeoned the head of the little girl repeatedly with his rifle butt until she was dead.

Meanwhile in the Harans’ apartment, Einat’s mother Smadar accidentally smothered her other, two-year-old daughter to death, trying to keep her quiet, while they hid from the attackers.

For three decades Kuntar has been regarded as a psychopathic monster by the Israelis.

Yet a majority still believe he should be released in exchange for the remains of two Israeli soldiers kidnapped by Hizbollah in 2006. Such is the strength of the Jewish tradition that everything humanly possible must be done to bring home your own kind.

Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev told Sky News that authorising the swap had not been an easy decision.

He said: ”We don’t want to empower or strengthen terrorists.

“But it must be remembered, every young Israeli serviceman or woman who is doing national service for the country, man and woman, they have to know and their families have to know, if ever they are taken and held hostage behind enemy lines we will do what needs to be done to bring them home.

“It’s very much part of the Israeli ethos.”

Kuntar, a Lebanese Druzee, was jailed before Hizbollah even existed but his freedom has become an Arab cause celebre, one which the militant Shi’ite organisation has readily adopted.

Zvi Regev, Eldad’s father, said: ”It was hard to see one coffin being lowered to the ground and then another one. It was awful to see it. I asked them to turn off the television because I didn’t want to see it.

“We always hoped that Eldad and Udi would return home alive and that we would be able to hug them.”

Two days before the two Israeli soldiers were kidnapped in 2006, Hizbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah promised to bring Kuntar home.

The abduction was in many ways a miscalculation. Nasrallah did not anticipate it would spark a month-long war, costly to both sides.

But, finally, two years later, he will be able to fulfil his promise scoring a success that increases his movement’s popularity and the strength of its power here.