Israel: Grim Swap That Draws a Line Under Lebanon War

It began with an ambush that sparked a war in which nearly 1,200 people died. It will end at 9am today, two years on from that fateful raid, when two boxes of human remains are delivered into Israel through the Rosh Hanikra crossing, 15 miles from the scene of the original attack, to be buried by the families of two missing Israeli soldiers.

For the relatives of those soldiers, Eldad Regev, 27, and Ehud Goldwasser, 32, today marks the end of months of campaigning and agonized waiting. "We will accept whatever will be. We need to be strong and accept it for better or for worse," Regev's father, Zvi, said yesterday.

It was two years ago this month when the Lebanese militant group Hizbullah struck, firing several rockets and ambushing a military Humvee patrolling a deserted road among the woody hills of northern Israel. The ambush left the Humvee shattered, half-flattened, burnt out.

From the wreckage, Hizbullah gunmen dragged out Regev and Goldwasser and took them back over the border into southern Lebanon. For the first time since Israel withdrew from its 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon in 2000, it sent its troops over the border in pursuit.

The retaliatory raid quickly escalated into war: thousands of Israeli troops invaded as fighter jets bombed targets in the south and in Beirut. General Dan Halutz, the army chief of staff, threatened to "turn back the clock in Lebanon by 20 years" if the soldiers were not freed.

Hizbullah refused to give them up. After 34 days a ceasefire was agreed. Regev and Goldwasser were still missing and, despite the bombing meted out at such cost to southern Lebanon, Hizbullah survived as a fighting force. Later, Israel concluded that the two soldiers were probably dead. Neither may even have survived the initial ambush.

For the Israeli military, the Israeli defense Force, the return was about a "moral commitment" to bring back all soldiers captured or lost in combat.

"Such a move demonstrates a compelling moral strength which stems from Judaism, Israeli social values and from the spirit of the IDF," it said.

Yet what of the price? The return of the two soldiers comes in the form of a prisoner swap, not the first that Israel has conducted with its enemies and surely not the last. As the two bodies cross south into Israel, five Lebanese prisoners will cross to the north. Opinion polls suggest the Israeli public supports the exchange but for many it is deeply unpalatable because foremost among the five is a man called Samir Kuntar.

Kuntar was one of a small group of militants who took a rubber dinghy from Lebanon into the shoreline of northern Israel in 1979. He was just 16. They attacked an apartment building in Nahariya, a few miles south of the border, and broke into the home of Danny and Smadar Haran.

Witnesses later described how Kuntar dragged Danny and his four-year-old daughter, Einat, to the beach, where he shot Danny and killed his daughter by smashing a rifle butt to her head. Smadar hid their second daughter, Yael, who was two, with her in a crawlspace in the bedroom. As she tried to stifle her daughter's cries she accidentally smothered her to death. Kuntar has been in an Israeli jail ever since, convicted of several counts of murder, attempted murder and kidnapping. Last night he was to be formally pardoned ahead of his release today.

Two years on from the ambush, that pardon will achieve what the costly war did not.

The war brought tragedy to hundreds of families, their number undeniably greater on the Lebanese side, and Israeli cluster bombs dropped over southern Lebanon continue to kill and maim today. It also demonstrates once again that Israel does eventually indirectly negotiate with militant groups for the return or release of its soldiers. Such negotiations are under way now with Hamas for the release of another captured Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, who was taken a month before the Lebanon war and who is believed to be still alive.

It exacted political costs too. Halutz, the general who oversaw such a fierce bombing campaign, resigned six months later just before a high-level inquiry exposed how poorly the Israeli government and military had conducted its war. Within a year Amir Peretz, the defence minister, had been replaced. Ehud Olmert, the prime minister, is still in office but has been so badly wounded politically by the perceived failings of the war that few believe he can ever recover his career.

Instead it is Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hizbullah, who emerges stronger than before. He boasts how his militia delivered a painful challenge to Israel's presumed military superiority.

Even though he has faced criticism within Lebanon for the war and, more recently, for factional clashes, Kuntar's release will be portrayed as a symbolic victory and one that Nasrallah will use to argue that his movement still has a valuable role in "resistance" to Israel.