Israeli prison guards escort the Lebanese prisoner Samir Kuntar as he is released from the Hadarim prison in preparation for his handover to Hizbullah as part of a prisoner exchange.
Ian Black, Middle East editor
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday July 16, 2008
"Hassan Nasrallah, the Hizbullah leader, will be relishing a moment of undiluted triumph over today's exchange of prisoners and bodies with Israel, buttressing his movement's position as the vanguard of Lebanese "resistance" and a formidable player on the Middle Eastern stage.
Nasrallah, the architect of what he famously dubbed the "divine victory" over Israel in the 2006 war, is making good on pledges to bring his boys home from Israeli prisons.....
Underlining Nasrallah's sense of victory and revenge, the exchange is being dubbed Operation Radwan, after Haj Radwan, aka Imad Mughniyeh, the legendary Hizbullah commander and arch-terrorist who was assassinated in Damascus in February. His death is blamed by most observers on Israel's Mossad secret service, and he is rumoured to have masterminded the 2006 border raid.....But there is an unmistakable sense that Israel, still smarting from its failure to win the war against Hizbullah, has come off second best....
The implications for Lebanon are striking too. It was Hizbullah, not the Lebanese government, which won the release of these prisoners, who will be greeted as national heroes by the country's president, prime minister and other leaders at Beirut airport.
"The result is that Hizbullah emerges as the force in Lebanon that can deliver, thereby perpetuating an important political dynamic — of the non-state actor which functions as the de facto state versus the state non-actor which merely enjoys the status of de jure state," analyst Amal Saad-Ghorayeb wrote on the openDemocracy website.
The fact that Kuntar is a Druze also helps Nasrallah in his bid to cast Hizbullah as a truly national resistance, acting for all Lebanese, not just for the Shia community.....
The Israeli government has been anxious to insist that the prisoner agreement with Hizbullah does not grant it any legitimacy or recognition - the same attitude it has taken in dealing with the Palestinian Islamists of Hamas over a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip. But it clearly remains a formidable enemy......"
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