JERUSALEM — The Israeli Cabinet's approval Sunday of a prisoner swap with the militant group Hezbollah touched off cries of victory in Lebanon and sparked fresh debate within the Jewish state over the price of its determination to retrieve missing soldiers.
After weeks of emotional public speculation and a six-hour Cabinet debate, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's government voted 22 to 3 in favor of a deal that would return two captured Israeli soldiers. Olmert acknowledged Sunday that they were probably dead.
In return for the men or their bodies, Hezbollah would receive several imprisoned Lebanese militants, the bodies of about a dozen other fighters and the release of a still-unspecified number of Palestinian prisoners.
Hezbollah's leadership still has to approve the deal, but the Shiite Muslim group on Sunday hailed it as a victory for the strategy of armed resistance.
"Today the enemy was forced to recognize the logic of the resistance," said an announcer on the Hezbollah-run Al Manar television channel. "Our prisoners cannot be liberated with words, diplomacy and tears. Blood liberated the land as well as the people."
At the top of the list of those sought by Hezbollah is Samir Kuntar, Israel's longest-held Lebanese prisoner. He is serving life sentences in the 1979 deaths of several members of an Israeli family and a police officer. Al Manar showed footage of preparations to celebrate Kuntar's return in the southern coastal city of Saida.
Olmert told his Cabinet that the agreement would "bring an end to this painful episode -- even at the painful price it costs us. . . . From our earliest days, we are taught that we do not leave men behind."
Just how high a price Olmert paid will be an ongoing topic of Israeli public debate, focused on the danger of agreeing to trade the living for the dead -- as might be the case here.
The two soldiers, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, were captured in a July 2006 cross-border ambush that touched off a monthlong war between Israel and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. Evidence from the scene indicated that both soldiers were wounded in the attack, one of them gravely.
Unlike in the case of Cpl. Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier taken in southern Israel in June 2006 and still held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Hezbollah has offered no proof that either Regev or Goldwasser is alive. The International Committee of the Red Cross was never allowed to visit them.
