Israel-Hizbullah Prisoner Exchange: Profiles

Samir Kuntar

A Lebanese Druze, Kuntar was 17 in 1979 when he took part in a raid on the Israeli coastal town of Nahariya on behalf of the Palestine Liberation Front. Captured and tried, he was sentenced to multiple life sentences amounting to 542 years for killing an Israeli policeman, a civilian called Danny Haran and his four-year-old daughter, whose skull he smashed with a rifle butt. Compounding the tragedy, Haran's terrified wife Smadar hid in a wardrobe with another daughter but accidentally smothered her to death while trying to stop her crying. Kuntar, now 41, is a hero to many Lebanese and Palestinians and is reviled in Israel as a despicable murderer. (IB)

Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser

Both Israeli soldiers, who bodies were returned to their homeland today, were captured in an audacious raid by Hizbullah guerrillas across the Israeli-Lebanese border in July 2006. Both were doing reserve military service at the time. Goldwasser, who was married, worked at the Technion, the Israeli Institute of Technology. Regev, who was single, worked for the Israeli telephone company Bezeq. (IB)

Dalal al-Mughrabi

As an 18-year-old Palestinian girl from Lebanon, she led a daring and bloody attack against Israel that still haunts the public imagination on both sides of the border 30 years later. In 1978, Mughrabi led a team of 13 Palestinian and Lebanese fighters who landed at Jaffa beach intent on attacking the ministry of defence in Tel Aviv. On the coastal highway, Mughrabi's team hijacked two buses full of Israeli soldiers. An intense 15-hour gun battle ensued with forces led by future Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak. Mughrabi raised her national flag and declared the Palestinian state.

One of the buses exploded, killing many inside. Israel says Mughrabi threw grenades into it; Palestinians maintain the bus was fired on from the air by Israeli helicopters. At least 37 Israelis (Palestinians claim 70) were killed, as well as 11 guerrillas. Mughrabi's body was dragged off the tarmac and shot several times by Barak in images captured by the media. (HM)Ron Arad

Absent from today's swap will be Israel's most famous missing soldier, Ron Arad. In 1986, the 28-year-old Arad was navigating his Phantom fighter jet on a mission to attack Palestinian targets near the southern Lebanese port city of Sidon. The fighter's ordenance is thought to have exploded in mid-air, forcing Arad and the pilot to eject. Israeli forces rescued the pilot a few hours later, but Arad was captured by the Shia militia group Amal, then the dominant force over the still fledgling Hizbullah. Following a year of failed talks over a prisoner exchange, nothing further has been heard of the missing airman.

His fate has gripped a generation of Israelis. Was he taken to Iran, as Israeli media reports have suggested, by Revolutionary Guards working with Hizbullah? Did he die in Lebanon? And if so, how? Last weekend Israelis pored over 20-year-old pictures of a bearded Arad just received from Hizbullah, along with diary excerpts and an 80-page-report into the group's investigation into the missing airman. Hizbullah said they believed Arad was killed in an Israeli raid on a village in south Lebanon in 1988, but only offered what Israeli officials said was an incomplete account. (HM)