The Cabinet is expected to approve the release of five Palestinian Authority (PA) terrorists Sunday as the final part in the swap with Hizbullah that brought home the bodies of kidnapped IDF reservists Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev.
Five Hizbullah terrorists including convicted murderer Samir Kuntar were already freed, and the bodies of 199 other killers were returned under the agreement. Israel committed itself to releasing an unspecified number of PA terrorists, the specific number of which would be decided by Israel.
The deal was also supposed to require Hizbullah to supply information concerning the fate of missing Israeli Air Force navigator Ron Arad, whose aircraft was shot down over Lebanon in 1986.
Hizbullah reported that it believed Arad to be dead, but said it was not able to verify his death, nor could it obtain information as to where his body was buried. The terrorist group, which briefly held the missing airman after he was captured by Amal terrorists, "sold" Arad to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards in 1988.
His condition and whereabouts after that point remain a mystery.
In the report Hizbullah submitted to Israel, the group included two previously unseen photographs as well as a journal kept by the captive airman, and two letters he had written but had never been handed over by the terrorist group.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert criticized the terrorist organization for providing "inadequate" information in its report on Arad’s fate, but he and the Cabinet nevertheless approved the deal in order to secure the return of Goldwasser’s and Regev’s bodies.
The two IDF reservists, Goldwasser and Regev, were kidnapped on July 12, 2006 in a cross-border raid that was carried out as part of a complex multi-pronged attack by the Shi’ite terrorist group that ignited the Second Lebanon War.