Israel Swaps Bodies With Hezbollah
With the stench of death sealing their grim swap, Israel returned the bodies of 123 Hezbollah guerrillas and a group of prisoners Sunday in exchange for the corpses of two Israeli soldiers killed in southern Lebanon.
The first batch of coffins and the 22 prisoners were brought to this crossing at the edge of an Israeli-occupied border enclave after the remains of two Israeli soldiers captured in a 1986 Hezbollah ambush arrived at Israel’s Ben-Gurion airport.
As part of the biggest exchange between Israel and the militant Islamic group in 14 years, 23 more Lebanese prisoners were to be freed later Sunday, along with 18 remaining bodies.
In Tel Aviv, the two coffins containing the corpses of Rahamim Alsheikh and U.S.-born Yosef Fink were carried off a plane while a military rabbi read a prayer and an Israeli honor guard stood at attention.
Their bodies were flown from Beirut on a German air force plane accompanied by Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s top intelligence advisor, Bernd Schmidbauer, who mediated the deal during three months of secret negotiations.
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