(AFP) – Jul 15, 2008

JERUSALEM (AFP) — Israel gave the green light on Tuesday for a prisoner swap with Lebanon's Hezbollah after pardoning its longest serving Arab prisoner to bring home two of its soldiers, dead or alive.

The release to take place on Wednesday of five Lebanese prisoners includes the perpetrator of a brutal 1979 triple murder, in exchange for the two Israeli soldiers captured by Hezbollah in a deadly 2006 raid that sparked a 34-day war.

"The government has ratified the deal," Deputy Prime Minister Eli Yishai told reporters after a cabinet meeting which adopted the measure.

The families of the two Israeli soldiers -- Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev -- have never been told by the Shiite militant group Hezbollah of their fate, although both are widely believed to be dead.

Under the UN-brokered deal through a German negotiator, Israel will also hand over the remains of 200 Lebanese and Palestinian fighters.

President Shimon Peres late on Tuesday pardoned Samir Kantar , who was serving multiple life terms, and the four other Lebanese, the Israeli media reported.

He said it was "not a happy day having to free such murderers but we have a moral responsibility to bring our soldiers home."

The swap, the eighth between Israel and Hezbollah since 1991, stirred controversy over the inclusion of Kantar, a Lebanese fighter with a Palestinian faction who killed three Israeli civilians including a child in 1979.

The cabinet first approved the swap deal in June but was asked to endorse it again after Israel received a Hezbollah report on missing Israeli airman Ron Arad, whose fate has long been a cause celebre in the Jewish state.

Arad has been missing since his plane was shot down over Lebanon in 1986 during that country's civil war, and although the report said he was probably dead, Israel has rejected its findings.

A cabinet statement said the report "does not meet the conditions of the agreement over the fate of Ron Arad. The Israeli government will continue in its efforts to retrieve any possible information over the fate of Ron Arad."

Yishai said the swap came at "a much lower price than what we had to pay in the past, with all the pain involved in it. We did not want to put the Regev and Goldwasser families in the same situation as the Arad family."

The Goldwasser and Regev families have been pushing hard for the swap.

Goldwasser's father Shlomo told AFP that if his son comes home in a coffin, Hezbollah must pay the price.

"Our basic assumption has been that they were kidnapped alive. If they return in coffins it would mean they were killed. Those who killed them must pay with their lives ... if that is the case."

While the mood in Israel is sombre, Hezbollah plans a hero's welcome for its fighters, with celebratory banners and flags lining the main highway from the border with Israel at Naqura to Lebanon's southern port city of Sidon.

"We are a people who will not abandon our detainees in prison," reads one banner, taken from a pledge by Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah. "Thanks to the weapons of the resistance, we will free our prisoners," says another.

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