Israel, Hezbollah honour exchanged soldiers, "martyrs" (Roundup)

Jul 17, 2008, 13:29 GMT

Tel Aviv/Beirut - Thousands gathered in Israel Thursday for the solemn funerals of two soldiers repatriated in a prisoner exchange with Hezbollah, as the radical Shiite movement honoured 199 dead fighters and militants with a flamboyant parade through Lebanon.

Israel had handed over to Hezbollah the 199 bodies as part of Wednesday's exchange, under which it also released five Lebanese prisoners.

They included convicted killer Samir Kuntar and four Hezbollah prisoners of war captured in the second Lebanon war. The July 2006 cross-border raid by Hezbollah in which its militants had snatched the two soldiers, Eldad Regev and Ehud (Udi) Goldwasser, had triggered that month-long conflict, which had failed to secure their release.

Hezbollah Wednesday returned the two soldiers, who were likely killed during their capture, in coffins, dashing slim but last hopes in Israel that at least one of them might still be alive.

Regev and Goldwasser received full military honours Thursday, with an honour guard carrying their coffins, wrapped in blue-and-white Israeli flag, and saluting them by firing single, carefully- synchronized volleys into the air.

'They say that time does its thing and heals all wounds. Does it?' a tearful Karnit Goldwasser, Ehud's widow, asked in an emotional eulogy.

The 32-year-old has over the past two years been prominent in the Israeli media as she traveled the world and met foreign leaders, campaigning tirelessly for the return of her husband and of Regev. The couple had been married for six months when Goldwasser, going on 31 at the time, was captured on the last day of his reserve duty. They had no children.

'More than once I find myself thinking how our lives would have developed and turned out if we were still together,' she said.

'For you it was just a regular morning when you reported to serve your country,' she added. 'We didn't believe that morning was the last time we'd see each other: The embrace was warm, but regular. The kiss was loving, but hasty.'

Goldwasser's mother, Micky in dark sunglasses, seemed stoic and motionless, when she vowed: 'Udi, eyes may be turned to me and expect tears. But I won't cry. Not now.'

She pointed out that he had been a man of ideals, who fought for the environment and against illegal construction in the occupied territories.

Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak attended both funerals and vowed that Israel also in the future would spare no efforts to bring back soldiers missing in action.

'We were willing to pay a very high price, which sometimes may have seemed unreasonable,' he told mourners attending the service for Regev in the port city of Haifa.

'The Israel Defence Forces will always act to bring living, injured and dead soldiers home,' he vowed, making a similar pledge at the funeral of Goldwasser earlier in the morning.

'The knowledge that you will be brought home is the spirit which leads you ... and which in the future will also lead to victory,' he told soldiers and officers at the military cemetery in Goldwasser's hometown of Nahariya, on the coast north of Haifa.

Barak was defending the deal with Hezbollah, brokered by a United Nations-appointed German mediator but controversial in Israel, against critics, who had argued that the country had paid too high a price for the two dead soldiers.

Critics have been angered especially by the release of Kuntar, regarded by Israelis as a ruthless killer for his role in a 1979 raid into northern Israel that left five Israelis dead.

Hezbollah chief Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah late Wednesday, in brief public appearance, his first in 18 months, hailed it as a 'victory.'

On Thursday morning, Hezbollah paraded the remains of the 199 fighters and militants on elaborately-decorated see-through tractor- trailers making their way from the southern Lebanon border town of Naqoura to the capital Beirut while stopping in numerous villages, where onlookers threw rice and flowers at them.

'The Martyrs of Victory,' said a banner on one of the trucks, which all carried large posters of late Hezbollah military commander Imad Mughniyeh, said to have planned the 2006 raid in which Regev and Goldwasser were snatched and which achieved the prisoner swap. Hezbollah dubbed the exchange 'Operation Haj Radwan' in his honour.

The 199 include seven Hezbollah guerillas who fell in the 2006 war. But the majority were Palestinians who carried out attacks in Israel during the 1970s and 1980s, including Dalal al-Mughrabi, remembered by Palestinians as a heroine and by Israelis as a terrorist for hijacking a bus on Israel's coastal highway in March 1978, leading to the deaths of over 30 people.

Mughrabi's body was accompanied by the remains of three other members of the raiding party whose attack triggered Israel's 1978 invasion of southern Lebanon, then a stronghold of Palestinian factions.

In southern Beirut, meanwhile, the five released prisoners, including Kuntar, laid wreaths at the grave of Mughniyeh Thursday morning.

Kuntar, who received a red-carpeted welcome at Beirut International Airport and a mass celebration in a southern Beirut stadium late Wednesday, then headed for his Druze village of Abey.