Jerusalem (CNSNews.com) – Two years and four days after they were abducted in a cross-border raid, the bodies of two Israeli soldiers were returned home on Wednesday.
 
Israel is exchanging five live prisoners for the corpses, as part of a German-mediated deal with the Lebanese terrorist organization Hezbollah.
 
“It’s a solemn day for Israel,” said David Baker, a senior official in Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s office. “Israel stands in unison with the families of the soldiers.”
 
The abduction of Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev sparked the 34-day Israel-Hezbollah war in the summer of 2006.
 
Many Israelis are highly critical of the price Israel is paying for the soldiers’ bodies.
 
Hezbollah, on the other hand, considers the corpses-for-live prisoners exchange as further proof of its victory.

Cries of despair could be heard at the home of the Regev family after pictures of two coffins were broadcast on Lebanese television. Mourners flocked to house and lit memorial candles by the front door of the family home under a large framed picture of Eldad.
 
Although the Israeli government said it believed the soldiers were dead, Hezbollah refused to give any information on them and the families had held out hope to the end that at least one of the soldiers would come home alive.
 
Two hours before the exchange, Goldwasser’s mother Miki told a local television reporter that she still had hope that her son was alive.
 
The families had no immediate comment to the press following the transfer of the coffins. Funerals could take place as soon as this evening, once Israeli officials confirm the identification of the remains inside the coffins.
 
The identification process continued for hours after the International Committee of the Red Cross transferred the coffiins to Israel. In the end, Israel did confirm that the remains are those of Regev and Goldwasser.
 
Hezbollah, in turn, is set to welcome home arch-terrorist Samir Kuntar and four other combatants imprisoned in Israel. It also will receive the remains of 199 bodies of terrorists killed while trying to infiltrate Israel.
 
Kuntar and three other terrorists infiltrated Israel’s northern border in 1979. Acting on behalf of a Palestinian terror group, they broke into the home of the Haran family and abducted a father and his young daughter. Kuntar was convicted of killing Danny Haran in front of the little girl, then smashing the child’s head with a rifle butt.
 
Haran’s wife hid in a crawl space with their two-year old daughter, whom she accidentally smothered while trying to keep her quiet.
 
Happy day
 
Hezbollah planned a symbolic ceremony at Nakoura on the Lebanese side of the border, and then it plans to throw what it is calling the “mother of all parties” in Beirut later on Wednesday.
 
Sheikh Nabil Kaouk, a Hezbollah commander, said the prisoner swap represented Israel’s “humilitating military and political defeat in its confrontation” with Hezbollah.
 
Early morning radio newscasts in Israel opened with Hezbollah victory music.  “This is Lebanon 2008, a Hezbollah state that is today broadcasting praise songs and is preparing a reception for heroes, the terrorist that murdered a four-year-old little girl and her father…in Nahariya in 1979,” said the newscaster on Israel’s state run radio.
 
Miri Eisin, who served as Olmert’s spokeswoman during the Second Lebanon War and is now a private commentator, said the Hezbollah celebration for a child-killer shows what kind of people they are.
 
No happy ending for Israel
 
There is no “happy ending” in the return of the Israeli soldiers, Eisin told Cybercast News Service by telephone from the border. But Israel can “stand proud” because of its moral fiber in being committed to return soldiers home, she said.
 
It is the end of things for the families, Israeli lawmaker Yuval Steinitz said in a television interview. “But it’s a very bad end for the battle against terrorism.”
 
Israel became the only Western nation, maybe the only nation in the world, to exchange terrorists and murderers for bodies and parts of bodies, Steinitz said. “It’s a dangerous precedent.”
 
Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri also declared that the exchange was a “very big victory” for “the resistance” as well as for Hezbollah.
 
He was quoted as saying that it was “proof that kidnapping Zionist soldiers is the best way to free the prisoners since the occupation keeps arresting them.”