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Israel handed over 5 Lebanese prisoners to Hezbollah this week in exchange for the bodies of two Israeli soldiers. The exchange was the culmination of months of intense negotiations that ended after the Israeli cabinet voted on Tuesday to release Samir Kantar, one of the Lebanese prisoners whose freedom Hezbollah lobbied strenuously for. Kantar and three others spent three decades in Israeli custody for the 1979 murders of a man and his 4 year old daughter. Until the very last minute of negotiations Hezbollah remained on quiet about the fact that the two Israeli soldiers they had captured 2 years ago, were in fact dead. Hezbollah also received from Israel the bodies of almost 200 people, including that of Dalal al-Maghrebi, a female fighter with the Palestinian Fatah movement. The press is reporting this exchange as the closing of a painful chapter that began with the 2006 summer war between Israel and Lebanon. The Lebanese capture of the Israeli soldiers, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev was cited as the spark for that war which resulted in thousands of people dead and an economy destroyed in Lebanon. Samir Kantar and his fellow released prisoners received a heroes welcome in Lebanon. According to Al Jazeera’s correspondent in the West Bank, Palestinians viewed the exchange as “a victory for Arab resistance.”

GUEST: Jackson Allers, produces Al Jazeera International’s People and Power, Editor in Chief of the Arab Press Freedom Website Menassat.com, correspondent for Inter Press Service, and reporter for FSRN in Lebanon For more information, visit www.menassat.com.