An Israeli negotiator was in Europe yesterday to pick up a report compiled by Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas on a long-missing Israeli airman, part of a prisoner swap deal between the two sides, defense officials said.
Negotiator Ofer Dekel is to receive the report from a UN-appointed German official who mediated the deal. It is supposed to detail efforts the Iranian-backed Hezbollah made to find out what happened to airman Ron Arad after his plane crashed in Lebanon in 1986.
Arad was captured alive by Shiite militants and changed hands several times before disappearing without a trace two decades ago.
There have been reports that Arad was transferred to Hezbollah and then to Iran, but no reliable evidence of his fate has ever surfaced.
In exchange for the report on Arad, Israel is to provide information on four Iranian diplomats, who disappeared in Lebanon in 1982. Iran claims they were kidnapped by Lebanese militiamen allied with Israel, who delivered them to Israeli troops. Israel has long denied holding them, and Samir Geagea, former head of the disbanded Lebanese Forces, has said militiamen killed them.
Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, taking over large areas as part of a military blitz to expel Palestinian guerrillas.
The exchange of reports is part of a wider deal in which Israel is to hand over to Hezbollah four Lebanese prisoners in exchange for the bodies of two Israeli soldiers. The soldiers’ capture in a July 2006 cross-border raid touched off Israel’s second war in Lebanon.
One of the Lebanese prisoners, Samir Kantar, has been held in an Israeli prison nearly 30 years for his role in a 1979 infiltration attack that Israelis perceive as one of the cruelest in their history.
Kantar dragged a man and his four-year-old daughter from their apartment to the beach below, and according to witness testimony, shot the man to death in front of his child, then crushed her head against a rock with his rifle butt. He also was convicted of killing a policeman.
The man’s wife accidentally smothered their two-year-old daughter in an effort to keep her from crying out and disclosing their hiding place in a crawl space in the apartment.
Kantar has denied killing the older child or crushing her skull.
Israel had hoped Kantar would be a bargaining chip to wrest information from Hezbollah about Arad’s fate, but recently concluded that Hezbollah has no new information about the airman.
Last week, the Israeli Cabinet voted to trade Kantar for the bodies of the Israeli servicemen, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev.
On Sunday, Israel TV showed video of tractors beginning the process of exhuming the bodies of Hezbollah fighters that also are to be handed over as part of the deal.
No firm timetable for carrying out the swap has been announced, but Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah has said it would take place in the middle of this month.
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