NAQOURA, Lebanon, 31 January 2004 — Lebanon received the bodies of 60 fighters yesterday as part of a prisoner swap deal between Israel and Hezbollah fighters, witnesses said.
Seven International Committee of the Red Cross trucks drove the bodies to a reception area, where Hezbollah medics draped Lebanese flags over the pine coffins and loaded them into three trucks with transparent sides.
Most of the fighters were killed during Israel’s 22-year occupation of south Lebanon, which ended in 2000.
“Today is a day of victory, freedom and pride for all of us,” said one woman, holding a framed picture of her dead son Farajallah Fouaina who was among those returned.
“I told him to stop fighting, but he said he would not so long as there was a single Israeli on his land. He didn’t stop until he was martyred.”
The ICRC received the bodies from Israel on Thursday as part of a German-mediated swap deal, more than three years in the making, in which Israel freed 400 Palestinian prisoners and 36 others, mostly Lebanese.
In return, Hezbollah returned a captive Israeli businessman and the bodies of three Israeli soldiers killed in a Hezbollah border raid in 2000.
The bodies of the fighters will be taken to Beirut, where their identities will be confirmed before they are returned to villages and towns today for burial.
Families of the dead fighters lined the streets and waved yellow Hezbollah flags, Lebanese flags and the Lebanese Communist Party flag. Many of the dead were believed to belong to the Lebanese Communist Party.
Meanwhile, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei yesterday welcomed the prisoner exchange deal as a sign that “Zionist regime is defeatable,” state media reported.
“I congratulate you and the Hezbollah Mujahedeen, the people of Lebanon, especially the families of the prisoners, and the Palestinian people for the release of hundreds of sons of Islam from the prisons of the oppressor Zionist regime,” Khamenei said in letter to Hezbollah chief Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah.
Iranian President Mohammad Khatami was reported as saying he hopes the “remaining prisoners who are kept in the Zionist’s regime prisons will be freed as soon as possible.”
In his remarks, during a telephone conversation with Lebanese counterpart Emile Lahoud, Khatmai also thanked the Lebanese government for following the fate of four Iranian diplomats who disappeared during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982.
