Hezbollah turns over two coffins to Israel

JERUSALEM – Closing an uneasy chapter of its 2006 war against Lebanon’s Hezbollah guerrillas, Israel sent home the most notorious Lebanese convict in its prisons today in return for the remains of two Israeli soldiers whose capture sparked the fighting.

The swap, approved by Israel’s Cabinet on Tuesday, revived raw emotions on both sides of the 34-day conflict: Israel’s frustration over its failure to crush an Arab foe and Hezbollah’s euphoria in holding off a powerful army until a U.N.-brokered truce.

But it brought closure in the case of Israeli reservists Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, who were captured on the battlefield and left to a fate kept secret by the militant Islamic group until today.

As the exchange organized by the International Committee of the Red Cross got under way, two black coffins carrying the reservists’ bodies were driven to a seaside border crossing for inspection by Israeli forensic authorities.

DNA testing confirmed their identities five hours later, setting in motion the release of a Lebanese militant convicted of murdering two adults and a child. He went home unrepentant to a festive, government-sponsored hero’s welcome.

Painful though it is for Israelis, the arrangement reflects their country’s tradition of sparing no effort to retrieve captured soldiers or their remains. It is also the result of a campaign by the missing soldiers’ families to sway officials who were reluctant to give up a high-value prisoner.

“It’s not a happy choice,” Israeli President Shimon Peres said Tuesday before signing a pardon for the convict, Samir Kuntar. “On one hand, we have the most terrible murderer. On the other hand, we have our commitment to our boys who were sent to fight for their country. It is our moral duty and our heartfelt wish to see them come back.”

As the Israeli soldiers’ families waited at their homes this morning for word of their loved ones, Kuntar and four other Lebanese inmates included in the swap left prison in a police escorted convoy to an army camp near the border to await handover.

The televised arrival of the two coffins at the Lebanese side of the Nakoura-Rosh Hanikra crossing was the first concrete sign of the two men’s fate. They were turned over to the Red Cross for passage to the Israeli side.

“We are handing over the two Israeli soldiers who were captured by the resistance … and whose fate has been unknown until this moment,” Wafik Safa, a senior Hezbollah official, was quoted as telling Lebanon’s Al-Manar TV. “Now you know their fate.”

Safa said the bodies were mutilated by injuries suffered during the battle in which they were captured.

Regev’s father, Zvi, said he broke down the moment he saw a television broadcast of Hezbollah militants unloading the coffins from a van.

“It was horrible to see it,” he said, recounting a gathering of relatives and neighbors who watched the coverage from the Regev home. “I asked them to turn off the TV.”

Goldwasser’s father, Shlomo, told Israel Radio: “Coming face-to-face with reality is always tough.”

The mourning in Israel was a sharp contrast with the jubilation that greeted the prisoners’ return to Lebanon.

Hours before the prisoners crossed into Lebanon in Red Cross vans, hundreds of people had gathered in the border town of Nakouba for a welcoming ceremony that featured Hezbollah fighters on horseback, a drum corps and a giant red carpet rolled out on a road next to the seashore.

Kuntar, wearing jeans and a gray sweater, was mobbed by well-wishers on arrival.

Banners drew the contrast, with a picture of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert depicted with his hand on his forehead and the caption “humiliation guaranteed.”

“Lebanon is shedding tears of joy,” read one banner in the crowd.

A more elaborate reception for the prisoners planned at Beirut’s airport with the leaders of Lebanon’s government, which declared today a national holiday “to celebrate the liberation of prisoners from the jails of the Israeli enemy.”

Thousands of plastic chairs were being set up for a rally in their honor in the capital’s southern suburbs later today. Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah was expected to speak there.

Israel was also sending Lebanon the dug-up remains of 199 Lebanese and Palestinian fighters killed in clashes over the years. The first 12 bodies rolled into Lebanon this afternoon in flag draped coffins on the back of a flat-bed truck.

Israeli officials condemned the celebrations in Lebanon.

“Kuntar is a brutal murderer guilty of a heinous crime against an innocent child,” said government spokesman Mark Regev, who is no relation to the dead soldier. “Anybody celebrating him as a hero is trampling on fundamental decency.”

Today’s exchange, after 18 months of talks through U.N.-appointed German mediators, won Israeli approval despite a late hitch. The Cabinet said an 80-page Hezbollah report on what happened to an Israeli airman shot down over Lebanon 22 years ago sheds no new light on his possible whereabouts and “does not meet the conditions of the agreement.”

It said Israel would keep pressing for information about the airman, Ron Arad, but free the Lebanese prisoners anyway.

Hezbollah’s TV station, Al Manar, aired film clips Tuesday to celebrate the prisoners’ homecoming, which Nasrallah has proclaimed as a “victory … for every resistance movement and every noble and free person in the Arab world.”

Kuntar, then 16, was part of a cell that raided the northern Israeli town of Nahariya in 1979, fatally shooting a policeman and later a civilian, Danny Haran, in front of Haran’s 4-year-old daughter, Einat, and then killing her with rifle-butt blow to the head. Haran’s wife survived but accidentally suffocated their 2-year-old daughter as she tried to quiet the girl in a hiding place.

The war two summers ago started with a cross-border raid by Hezbollah aimed at seizing soldiers to bargain for the release of Kuntar, who was serving multiple life sentences, and other Lebanese prisoners.

Eight Israeli soldiers in a border-patrol convoy were killed in the raid and their bodies recovered. The Israeli military said Goldwasser and Regev, shown on video being half-carried and half-dragged into Lebanon, were seriously wounded and possibly killed in the attack.

The fighting escalated as Israel bombarded Lebanon from the air, and thousands of Hezbollah rockets rained on northern Israel. Before it was halted on Aug. 14, the conflict claimed the lives of 158 Israelis, including 39 civilians, and at least 1,035 Lebanese, most of them civilians, according to official counts on both sides.

The aftermath, with its dead and missing, has weighed heavily on both sides.

Despite its outward cheer, Hezbollah was separated from the border by a multinational peacekeeping force and lost much of its rocket arsenal. Wide destruction in southern Lebanon dimmed the group’s aura as a protector of Lebanese interests.

In recent weeks, however, Hezbollah has flexed its military might to achieve veto power, despite its minority status, in Lebanon’s new Cabinet. And Israeli officials say the group, aided by ally Iran, has restocked its arsenal, expanded its control of southern Lebanon and improved its air defense systems.

Olmert argued in an interview in May that Israel had weakened Hezbollah and “achieved deterrence” on its northern border. But the Israeli leader never recovered politically from the sting of two reports by a domestic panel of inquiry that censured him for rushing the army into Lebanon ill-prepared for a ground war and lacking realistic goals.

To many Israelis, the propaganda windfall reaped by Hezbollah over the swap feels like salt in a deep wound.

They sympathize with Nina Keren, mother of Danny Haran, who expressed “complete shock” and broke into tears Tuesday on Israel Radio after failing to talk Peres out of pardoning her son’s killer.

Housing and Construction Minister Zeev Boim, one of three Cabinet members who voted against the deal, said Israel’s willingness to “pay a high price for bodies” will give militants little incentive to keep captured soldiers alive.

That consideration is important as Israel negotiates with the Hamas for the Palestinian militant group’s release of Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier who was captured in June 2006 and is reported to be alive.

Even so, polls suggest a wide majority of Israelis support the swap. That sentiment was mobilized by relatives of the missing soldiers, notably Ehud Goldwasser’s mother, Mickey, who called the deal “a victory for the Israeli nation and what it holds dear.”

Because Israelis have already written off the conflict as a defeat, military affairs commentator Ofer Shelah said, they find it somewhat easier to swallow the release of a convict like Kuntar, who never expressed remorse.

“To Israelis, what matters now is closure for the families of the missing soldiers,” said Shelah, a historian of the 2006 war. “Most Israelis won’t get too depressed about these celebrations in Beirut. They’ll forget this and go on.”

Special correspondent Raed Rafei in Beirut contributed to this report.

 boudreaux@latimes.com