Beirut - The head of the Palestinian Fatah movement in
southern Lebanon said Sunday that the expected swap between Lebanon's
Hezbollah guerrilla movement and Israel will include the bodies of
Palestinian guerrillas who fell in Lebanon or carried out attacks
inside Israeli territories during the 1970s.
'Among the bodies that Lebanon will retrieve from Israel as part
of the expected swap, there will be 160 bodies of Fatah members,
including the body of Dalal al Moghrabi,' Sultan abu al Anian said in
the Palestinian camp of Rashidiyeh, east of Tyre.
Dalal al Moghrabi was a Palestinian woman who carried out an
attack on an Israeli bus in 1978, killing 36 Israelis.
Israel's Prison Service on Sunday confirmed that on Wednesday it
plans to release five Lebanese prisoners who are to be exchanged for
two Israeli soldiers abducted in 2006 by Hezbollah, Israel Army Radio
reported.
The exchange is part of a German-brokered prisoner swap with the
militant Shiite movement. The report quoted an Israel Prison
Services official as naming the five Lebanese prisoners up for
release, among them the longest-held and most high profile detainee,
Samir Kuntar.
Kuntar is serving multiple life sentences for a 1979 hostage-
taking raid in northern Israel in which he and his men killed four
Israelis.
'Samir Kuntar and four other Lebanese prisoners - Khaled Zidan,
Maher Kurani, Mohammed Sarur and Hussein Suleiman - will be taken on
Wednesday from their centres of detention to a place to be decided by
the Israeli army,' Israeli reports said.
Under the deal, Israel will release five Lebanese prisoners, the
remains of Hezbollah fighters and a number of Palestinians in
exchange for the bodies of its soldiers Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad
Regev.
Hezbollah captured the two Israelis in a cross-border raid on July
12, 2006 that sparked a devastating 33-day war with Israel that
killed more than 1,200 people in Lebanon, mostly civilians, and 160
Israelis, mostly soldiers.
Hezbollah did not allow the Red Cross to visit Regev or
Goldwasser, and never forwarded any sign of life from the two.
Israeli officials estimate they are dead.
Hezbollah chief Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah said earlier this month
that 'so far Hezbollah has not handed over any information about the
fate of the two soldiers. Anything said in Israel is mere
speculation.'
Israeli media also reported Sunday that Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert was due to convene his cabinet on Tuesday and likely authorise
the swap.
Olmert's representative on the prisoners issue, Ofer Dekel, signed
the deal brokered by a United Nation's-appointed German mediator
Gerhard Conrad on Sunday. The Israeli cabinet, after a charged,
hours-long session, approved the outline of the deal with Hezbollah
on June 29.
The Israeli media said on Saturday that the Jewish state had
received a report from Hezbollah on airman Ron Arad who went missing
in Lebanon in 1986 - one of the conditions to be fulfilled before the
prisoner swap goes ahead.
USA
Your Talkback on this Story