TEL AVIV | Israel agreed to pay a heavy price Sunday by freeing a prisoner convicted of the brutal murder of a 4-year-old girl in an exchange of prisoners and bodies that critics fear will further embolden the militant Hezbollah militia on its northern border.
Israel’s Cabinet overwhelmingly approved a prisoner exchange, in which it expects to receive the bodies of two soldiers whose kidnappings triggered a monthlong war nearly two years ago.
Hezbollah hailed the agreement as proof of victory, while Israelis faced still more soul searching over its failure to destroy the militant Islamist group during a brief war that exposed its northern population centers for the first time to deadly long-range rockets from the north.
The remains of soldiers Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser, both presumed to have died after being abducted on July 12, 2006, and an accounting of Ron Arad, a missing Israeli airman whose plane crashed in Lebanon in 1986, would be given to the Israelis.
Nearly three decades after killing a father and a 4-year old daughter from the northern Israel coastal town of Nahariya, Samir Kuntar is expected to go free, along with other Lebanese and Palestinian militants.
Israel’s Cabinet, which approved the deal 22-0 with three abstentions, ignored the advice of its intelligence services, which advised against the deal with Hezbollah.
That stirred up an unusually emotional debate among Israelis about tradeoff between the obligations of the government to families and soldiers, and the risks of encouraging more kidnappings by paying a seemingly exorbitant price to get them back.
“With every fiber of my being, I felt that this framework did not satisfy my expectations and hopes,” Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told his Cabinet.
“But for now - I believe that this is the only realistic choice, and in this choice - the moral weight tends towards the painful compromise over the decisive refusal.”
A similar dilemma has also dominated Israel’s discussion of the talks with Hamas to free Cpl. Gilad Shalit, who is thought to be alive in the Gaza Strip with a deal expected in the coming weeks to free hundreds of Palestinian prisoners for the young soldier.
In Lebanon, relatives of Kuntar are preparing a festive homecoming, while Hezbollah argues that the deal justifies its insistence on maintaining the strongest militia in the country to face Israel.
“Neither words, nor diplomacy, nor tears, nor kisses liberate our prisoners,” read a statement, according to the Ha’aretz newspaper Web site. “Only blood liberates the land.”
The release of the two Israeli soldiers kidnapped two years ago was one of the planks of the truce between Hezbollah and Israel enshrined in U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701, which halted the fighting.
The exchange was brokered by German interlocutors.
“By not returning these soldiers, it would be very demoralizing to the army and to the society,” said Michael Oren, a military historian who wrote an account of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War titled “Six Days of War.”
“On the other hand, by negotiating with terrorists to release hostages, you are setting up the next kidnapping,” he said.
The deal seems to break with Israel’s declared policy of refusing to recognize or negotiate with groups it defines as terrorists.
And yet, Israeli prime ministers from Shimon Peres in the 1980s to Ariel Sharon in 2003 have cut deals with terrorist groups.
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