ISRAEL: Lebanese prisoner Samir Kuntar at issue

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Samir Kuntar is Israel’s longest-held Lebanese prisoner. In 1979, the Druze teenager who had grown up during Lebanon’s civil war embarked on an attack against northern Israel, one from which he hasn’t returned.

Israel has suffered many attacks over the years, but the one that killed the family of Smadar Haran and a police officer nearly 30 years ago was seared into the nation’s collective memory, and the tragic results became a symbol.

So did Kuntar himself. A celebrity prisoner in Lebanon, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has set Kuntar’s release as a goal, repeatedly promising to free him and stating categorically that no prisoner swap would take place without him. Israel is loath to free Kuntar.

In the past, Kuntar was believed to be a bargaining chip for information about missing navigator Ron Arad. Israel had agreed to exchange him for ‘concrete proof of Arad’s fate’ that was to have been provided in the second stage of a 2004 German-brokered deal that had obtained the release of Elhanan Tannebaum, a reserve army colonel, and the bodies of three IDF soldiers abducted in 2000. The information never came, Kuntar never left and two Israeli reservists were kidnapped in 2006, sparking the Second Lebanon war.

A few days ago, the intelligence website ‘sigint’ (in Hebrew), reported that Kuntar’s website was showing graphic, disturbing images of what were said to be the charred remains of Israeli soldiers left in the battlefields during the war two summers ago. Three days later (the time it took me to gather the nerve to check for myself), the website that had been established many years ago by Kuntar’s brother, was gone. ‘Sorry, the site you requested has been disabled,’ was the message from Homestead. A reader named Shai posted a comment under the original report: ‘Someone in Israel decided to put an end to this website that displayed the shocking pictures and raised the price of [Eldad] Regev and [Udi] Goldwasser,’ the two reservists held by Hezbollah.

Kuntar, now in his mid-40s, is serving four back-to-back life sentences plus 47 years. He plans to marry in jail for the second time, it was reported two weeks ago (he had divorced his first wife after being denied rights by jail authorities). The prison authority said it had received no request for a wedding ceremony and it was speculated that the marriage -- if it takes place-- would be performed by exchanging documents via legal counsel. In 2005, he had given a rare interview (in Hebrew) to an Israeli paper.

-- Batsheva Sobelman in Jerusalem

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