Israel handed over five Lebanese prisoners to Hezbollah via the Red Cross on Wednesday after the Shi'ite guerrilla group returned the bodies of two Israeli soldiers seized in a cross-border raid in 2006.
Among the men who arrived at the border in an International Committee of the Red Cross convoy was Samir Qantar, Israel's longest-serving Lebanese prisoner. Wearing jeans and a grey sweater, he was mobbed by reporters and well-wishers on arrival.
Hezbollah has prepared a triumphal welcome for the five men freed under a deal seen by many Israelis as a painful necessity, two years after the two soldiers' capture sparked a 34-day war that killed about 1,200 people in Lebanon and 159 Israelis.
Israel retrieved the corpses of Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev only after agreeing to release Qantar, who had been serving a life term for the deaths of four Israelis, including a four-year-old girl and her father, in a 1979 Palestinian guerrilla raid on an Israeli town.
The four others are Hezbollah fighters captured in the 2006 conflict. All five were to be flown to Beirut ahead of a huge Hezbollah rally to welcome them in the evening.
President Michel Suleiman, Prime Minister Fouad Siniora and Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri were all expected to greet the former captives at the airport in a show of unity in Lebanon, which marked the occasion with a public holiday.
The ICRC drove the five released men to the headquarters of U.N. peacekeepers at the border village of Naqoura, where Hezbollah earlier handed over two black coffins containing the Israeli soldiers.
The Israeli army later said forensic teams had identified the cadavers as those of its missing men. Hezbollah had never disclosed whether they were alive or dead. It has not been clear how they met their deaths.
"The Israeli side will now hand over the great Arab mujahid (holy warrior) . Samir Qantar and his companions to the ICRC," Hezbollah official Wafik Safa said after delivering the bodies.
The release of the Lebanese prisoners, said by Hezbollah to be the last held in Israel, closes a file that has motivated repeated attempts by Shi'ite guerrillas over the past quarter century to capture Israelis to use as bargaining counters.
The fathers of the two Israeli soldiers spoke of their pain at watching the transfer of their sons' coffins on television.
PAINFUL REALITY
