Soon after midnight on April 22, 1979, Samir Kuntar, 16, a Lebanese Druse, slipped from a small boat onto one of Nahariya's beaches along with three other fighters from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The four men killed a policeman and broke into an apartment building and kidnapped Danny Haran and his 4-year-old daughter, Einat, taking them to a nearby beach. Mr. Kuntar was found guilty of murdering Mr. Haran in front of Einat, then turning to the child and crushing her skull against a rock with the butt of his rifle. Smadar Haran, Danny's wife, hid in the apartment's crawlspace with the couple's 2-year-old daughter, accidentally smothering her to death in an effort to stop her from crying out. Mrs. Haran has since remarried and has two daughters.
Israel is preparing to trade Mr. Kuntar and other Lebanese prisoners in an exchange with Hezbollah, which captured Ehud Goldwasser and another army reservist, Eldad Regev, in a cross-border raid that started the war between Hezbollah and Israel two years ago.
The deal has stirred an especially painful debate in Israel, where the captured reservists, Mr. Goldwasser and Mr. Regev, both university students, have
been declared dead. Though Israel has a history of trading large numbers of prisoners to receive captured soldiers, the prospect of exchanging the
country's most despised prisoner for corpses has raised hackles. There is also considerable mistrust of Hezbollah and fears that its seeming success in
obtaining Mr. Kuntar's release will only encourage it to attack again.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/16/world/middleeast/16israel.html?hp
