The head of the Palestinian Fatah movement in
southern Lebanon said Sunday that the expected swap between Lebanon's
Hezbollah guerrilla movement and Israel will include the bodies of
Palestinian guerrillas who fell in Lebanon or carried out attacks
inside Israeli territories during the 1970s.
'Among the
bodies that Lebanon will retrieve from Israel as part of the expected
swap, there will be 160 bodies of Fatah members, including the body of
Dalal al Moghrabi,' Sultan abu al Anian said in the Palestinian camp of
Rashidiyeh, east of Tyre.
Dalal al Moghrabi was a Palestinian woman who carried out an attack on an Israeli bus in 1978, killing 36 Israelis.
Israel's Prison Service on Sunday confirmed that on Wednesday it plans
to release five Lebanese prisoners who are to be exchanged for two
Israeli soldiers abducted in 2006 by Hezbollah, Israel Army Radio
reported.
The exchange is part of a German-brokered prisoner
swap with the militant Shiite movement. The report quoted an Israel
Prison Services official as naming the five Lebanese prisoners up for
release, among them the longest-held and most high profile detainee,
Samir Kuntar.
Kuntar is serving multiple life sentences for a
1979 hostage- taking raid in northern Israel in which he and his men
killed four Israelis.
'Samir Kuntar and four other Lebanese
prisoners - Khaled Zidan, Maher Kurani, Mohammed Sarur and Hussein
Suleiman - will be taken on Wednesday from their centres of detention
to a place to be decided by the Israeli army,' Israeli reports said.
Under the deal, Israel will release five Lebanese prisoners, the
remains of Hezbollah fighters and a number of Palestinians in exchange
for the bodies of its soldiers Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev.
Hezbollah captured the two Israelis in a cross-border raid on July 12,
2006 that sparked a devastating 33-day war with Israel that killed more
than 1,200 people in Lebanon, mostly civilians, and 160 Israelis,
mostly soldiers.
Hezbollah did not allow the Red Cross to
visit Regev or Goldwasser, and never forwarded any sign of life from
the two. Israeli officials estimate they are dead.
Hezbollah
chief Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah said earlier this month that 'so far
Hezbollah has not handed over any information about the fate of the two
soldiers. Anything said in Israel is mere speculation.'
Israeli media also reported Sunday that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was
due to convene his cabinet on Tuesday and likely authorise the swap.
Olmert's representative on the prisoners issue, Ofer Dekel, signed the
deal brokered by a United Nation's-appointed German mediator Gerhard
Conrad on Sunday. The Israeli cabinet, after a charged, hours-long
session, approved the outline of the deal with Hezbollah on June 29.
The Israeli media said on Saturday that the Jewish state had received a
report from Hezbollah on airman Ron Arad who went missing in Lebanon in
1986 - one of the conditions to be fulfilled before the prisoner swap
goes ahead.