The leader of Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, has personally welcomed home five militants freed by Israel.
The Israelis handed over the prisoners, along with the remains of 200 Lebanese and Palestinian fighters, in exchange for the remains of two of soldiers.
The soldiers' capture in 2006 sparked a brief war between Israel and Hezbollah.
Greeting the returnees at a huge rally in Beirut, Sheikh Nasrallah said the "age of defeats" was over.
 Hezbollah displayed coffins containing the bodies of the Israeli soldiers |
Tens of thousands of Hezbollah supporters, some travelling by car or scooter, converged on the south of city to celebrate the prisoners' release and listen to Sheikh Nasrallah speak.
Earlier, Lebanese President Michel Suleiman and other politicians from across the country's religious and political divide greeted the five men at Beirut airport.
Fireworks lit up the night sky and the crowds waved yellow Hezbollah flags. Some threw rice as they mobbed the cars carrying the ex-prisoners to the rally in the city's southern suburbs, Hezbollah's stronghold.
The most prominent of the ex-prisoners is gunman Samir Qantar, jailed in 1979 for killing a four-year-old Israeli girl and two other people.
It is clear Hezbollah means to extract the maximum possible publicity from this event, the BBC's Crispin Thorold reports from the rally.
The release, which has caused so much pain in Israel, is being treated as a triumph in Lebanon, by supporters and opponents of Hezbollah alike, he adds.
Maximum publicity
The ex-prisoners crossed into Lebanon in an exchange mediated by the International Committee of the Red Cross.
 | PRISONER EXCHANGE From Hezbollah: Bodies of Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, and remains of other Israeli soldiers killed in Lebanon in 2006 From Israel: Five Lebanese prisoners, including Samir Qantar, and remains of some 200 Lebanese and Palestinian fighters  |
Changing into combat fatigues, they stopped briefly in the coastal town of Naqoura before being flown to Beirut.
Sheikh Nasrallah's message, delivered in his first public appearance since September 2006, was that Lebanon could not be defeated.
He expressly linked the prisoners' release to "victory" over Israel in July 2006.
"The true, original and permanent identity of our region's peoples and our nation is that of resistance," he told the crowds.
"It is an identity of the will and culture of resistance and of the rejection of humiliation and occupation, regardless of who the occupiers, the tyrants and the powerful are."
Qantar also addressed the crowds, hailing Lebanon's "great Islamic resistance".
 Hezbollah supporters converged on the south of the city |
Under the exchange - the fruit of two years of delicate German mediation - Hezbollah is also to return the remains of Israeli soldiers killed in south Lebanon in 2006.
The agreement has caused controversy in Israel, with some ministers opposed to exchanging live Hezbollah prisoners for dead bodies.
Qantar controversy
Qantar had been in jail since 1979 for the deadly guerrilla raid in which he killed the child, her father and a policeman.
What kind of pathology can cause a society to celebrate such evil?
His imprisonment was arguably a catalyst for the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel, our correspondent says, as Lebanese militants captured the two Israeli soldiers to demand his release.
The Israeli soldiers, Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser, were seized in 2006 but until now there had been no confirmation of their deaths until Wednesday.
They are due to be given military funerals on Thursday.
Correspondents say the mood in Israel over the exchange of prisoners for the remains of dead soldiers is grim.
"Woe betide the people who celebrate the release of a beastly man who bludgeoned the skull of a four-year-old toddler," Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in a statement before he was due to meet the soldiers' families.
Hezbollah withheld any information about when the soldiers had died and never released pictures of them in captivity, leaving it unclear whether they had been killed in the original raid.
However, one Hezbollah official quoted by Lebanese TV on Wednesday confirmed that both soldiers had been seriously injured during the raid, and later died of their injuries.http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7510686.stm
Postingan
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar