BEIRUT (AFP)
Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah on Wednesday said a prisoner swap between his Lebanese Shiite movement and Israel would take place within two weeks and that news of missing airman Ron Arad was part of the deal.
"I officially announce that the accord has been accepted from our part and the matter closed, and we will respect the steps which are to be taken, God willing," he said at a news conference held by video link.
"I will not set an exact date. The sooner it takes place the better," Nasrallah said, adding that no more Lebanese prisoners would be left behind bars in Israel.
"I believe that in a week or two it will be implemented... July 15 is the most probable, a bit before or a bit after," he said. "If I set a date the Israelis will only change it."
On Sunday, Israel's cabinet approved a deal under which it would release five Lebanese prisoners, the remains of Hezbollah members and an undetermined number of Palestinians in exchange for the bodies of soldiers Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev.
They were captured, badly wounded, by Hezbollah in a cross-border raid on July 12, 2006 that sparked a devastating 34-day war in Lebanon that killed more than 1,200 people in Lebanon, mostly civilians, and 160 Israelis, mostly soldiers.
On Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told the cabinet the two were dead.
But Nasrallah said that "so far Hezbollah has not handed over any information about the fate of the two soldiers. Anything said in Israel is mere speculation. We have provided no information." |
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Ron Arad Nasrallah said that information on missing Israeli airman Ron Arad, as demanded by Israel, would be passed on through the German mediator, but he declined to give details.
Israel has insisted that if a deal were to go ahead it must be given information about the fate of the navigator whose aircraft was shot down over Lebanon in 1986 during the country's civil war.
The Haaretz daily said Hezbollah has already told Israel through U.N. mediator Gerhard Konrad that Arad is dead, but Israel wants the Shiite group to explain how it reached that conclusion and why it could not locate Arad's remains.
"We have informed the German mediator of our report on Ron Arad," Nasrallah said on Wednesday. "The mediator will soon visit Beirut and he will be given a written copy of the report then."
He said that after a prisoner exchange with Israel in 2004 "we worked seriously (on the Arad case), gathering witness accounts on the ground. We reached a definite conclusion based on this evidence.
"But we cannot reveal that now," he added. |
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Reactions in Israel The deal has drawn some criticism in Israel, with Mossad spy agency chief Meir Dagan voicing strong opposition during the cabinet meeting that approved it.
A controversial part of the new agreement is the release of Lebanese prisoner Samir Kuntar, a Palestine Liberation Front militant serving a 542-year sentence for killing two men and a four-year-old girl in a 1979 raid on northern Israel.
On Monday, Israeli officials said the prisoner swap could go ahead in two weeks if Hezbollah provides a report on Arad's fate.
The document given the green light by the cabinet on Sunday states that Israel alone will decide how many Palestinians to release.
"We have agreed on the mechanism" for the prisoner exchange, and "only the timetable remains," Nasrallah said on Wednesday.
"Thanks to this deal, if it goes through, Lebanon will be the first Arab state to close the file of its prisoners," he added. "There will be no more Lebanese prisoners in Israeli jails." |
