Israel has moved a number of Lebanese guerrillas in its custody ahead of Wednesday's planned United Nations-mediated prisoner exchange with Hizbullah.
Maher Qorani, Mohammad Srour, Hussein Suleiman and Khodr Zeidan were transferred from Ashmoret prison, near the coastal city of Netanya, where they have been held since their capture in the 2006 Lebanon war, to Hadarim jail some 11 kilometres away, a Prisons Services spokesman said today.
There, they joined Samir Qantar, a Hadarim inmate who is also due for release on Wednesday. Qantar, the most high-profile Lebanese prisoner in Israel, was jailed for life for killing a policeman, another man and his 4-year-old daughter in a raid in the northern Israeli town of Nahariya in 1979.
In return for releasing the five men, Israel will get back two of its soldiers, captured in a cross-border Hezbollah raid that triggered the 34-day war with the Iranian-backed group two years ago.
Hizbullah has given no word on the condition of the soldiers, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, although Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has said they are probably dead.
Under the deal, negotiated by a German intelligence officer, Israel will also hand over the bodies of 200 Arabs killed while infiltrating northern Israel, and Hizbullah will return the remains of Israeli soldiers killed in south Lebanon in 2006.
Mr Olmert had described Qantar as the last bargaining chip for word on the fate of Israeli airman Ron Arad, who disappeared after bailing out during a bombing run on Lebanon in 1986.
Critics of the current prisoner exchange deal have accused Olmert's government of abandoning any chance of recovering Arad.
As part of the swap, Israel received a report and previously unseen photos of the airman from Hizbullah, but there was no indication that the information had shed new light on his fate.
Reuters