Pat Dollard | Young Americans

Israel signs swap deal, begins exhuming bodies of Hezbollah guerillas

By Amos Harel, Barak Ravid and Yuval Azoulay (Haaretz)

Israel has signed a prisoner exchange agreement with Hezbollah, according to a statement released Monday by the Prime Minster’s Bureau. Israel Defense Forces soldiers have begun digging up the bodies of Lebanese combatants to be exchanged in the deal.

Ofer Dekel, Israel’s chief negotiator for securing the release of abducted soldiers, signed the deal on Sunday after meeting in Europe with the German mediator charged by the UN with brokering the exchange, Gerhard Konrad. “The continuation of the deal’s implementation is conditional upon the existence of a few more components,” a bureau spokesperson said, without explicitly stating what those components were.

Israel is expected to release Lebanese prisoners and Hezbollah will hand over two missing IDF soldiers in the exchange. Hezbollah kidnapped the soldiers - reservists Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev - during a cross-border raid that triggered the 2006 Second Lebanon War. Hezbollah has given no word on the soldiers’ condition, although they are widely presumed dead. Olmert declared Goldwasser and Regev dead before the cabinet approved the deal, but Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who has not allowed Red Cross visits or given any sign that the two are alive, called that declaration “speculation.”

The exchange is expected to take place in the next 10 days to two weeks.

The Prime Minister’s Bureau statement also noted that Israel has still not received the final report on the fate of missing Israel Air Force navigator Ron Arad that Hezbollah pledged to hand over. The report is supposed to detail efforts Hezbollah made to find out what happened to Arad after his plane crashed in Lebanon in 1986.

In any case it seems the final report on Arad will not influence the cabinet decision to proceed with the swap.

Dekel traveled to Europe yesterday to receive the report.

The army confirmed yesterday that the process of exhuming bodies has begun at the Amiad cemetery for enemy combatants, which has been declared a closed military zone to prevent reporters from witnessing the process.

Israel will also hand over the bodies of some 200 Arabs killed while infiltrating northern Israel, and Hezbollah will return body parts of Israeli soldiers killed in south Lebanon in 2006.

While Israeli officials refused to say whose bodies would be transfered to Lebanon, according to Palestinian sources the dead include Palestinian and Lebanese guerrillas killed in decades of conflict with Israel, and the bodies of eight Hezbollah fighters. The dead may include the perpetrators of the attacks in Ma’alot in 1974, on the Coastal Road in 1978, and near kibbutz Matzuba in 2002; and bodies of Lebanese and Palestinians killed during the 1978 Litani campaign and 1982 Lebanon War.

In exchange for the report on Arad, Israel is to provide information on four Iranian diplomats who disappeared in Lebanon in 1982. Iran claims they were kidnapped by Lebanese militiamen allied with Israel, who delivered them to Israeli troops. Israel has long denied holding the four, and Samir Geagea, former head of the disbanded Lebanese Forces, has said that militiamen killed them.

The next stage of the deal would come in another three weeks, after the cabinet determines the number of prisoners to be releaed and their identities.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak met in his Tel Aviv office Monday afternoon with the team he established to examine the principles involved in dealing with kidnapped and missing soldiers. The group, headed by former Supreme Court President Meir Shamgar, will formulate policy for the state’s handling of issues relating to such missing and captive soldiers.