With an intricately-planned prisoner swap set to go forward early Wednesday, Israeli President President Shimon Peres pardoned a Lebanese prisoner serving multiple life sentences in Israeli prison for a bloody 1979 terrorist attack, dpa reported.
The move late Tuesday removed the last barrier to a prisoner exchange deal with Lebanon's Hezbollah that is to take place at the Rosh Ha'Nikra/Naquora border crossing, the Israeli online news agency ynet reported. The Israeli cabinet gave its final approval to the deal earlier Tuesday.
The exchange was set for 9 am (0600 GMT), although local Lebanese television reported Israel had asked for a delay until 0800 GMT.
Peres emphasized that the pardon does not mean that the brutal deeds of the prisoner, Samir Kuntar, convicted of killing five Israelis, were forgiven or forgotten.
Peres met with relatives of Kuntar's victims before issuing the pardon.
Kuntar, the longest-held Arab in Israeli prison, led a Palestinian terrorist commando in 1979 that killed two Israeli police offices, two little girls and their father.
He crushed the skull of one of the girls with the butt of his rifle. Her grandmother opposed the swap to the very last.
In the exchange, worked out through UN mediation, Kuntar and four Hezbollah prisoners are to be swapped for two Israeli soldiers - Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Rev - captured on July 12, 2006, by Hezbollah militants in a cross-border raid that triggered a month-long, deadly and destructive war that failed to secure their release.
The two are widely believed to be dead, although Israel will only have final confirmation when the actual transfer takes place.
Under the agreement, Israel is also to hand over the bodies of 199 "enemy combatants," exhumed already last week from an anonymous cemetery in the north of the country.
Only after the two soldiers are identified will Israel transfer five Lebanese prisoners - Palestine Liberation Front (PLF) militant Kuntar and four Hezbollah fighters captured in the 2006 war.
An Israeli military statement said the border crossing would be declared a "closed military zone" as of Tuesday night, ahead of the swap, to be carried out under the auspices of the Red Cross.
The deal is controversial in Israel. Israelis fear that his release means giving up a last chance to obtain conclusive information on the fate of missing Israel Air Force navigator Ron Arad, whose plane was shot down over Lebanon in 1986 and who disappeared without a trace.
Israel had thus far refused to pardon Kuntar and include him in past prisoners exchanges, seeing him as a key bargaining chip in the case of Arad.
But under a compromise brokered by UN-appointed German mediator Gerhard Conrad, Israel agreed to receive a detailed report submitted by Hezbollah and detailing the radical Shiite movement's failed efforts to find out what had happened to Arad.
According to sources in the German capital Berlin on Tuesday, a German secret agent also contributed to the negotiations that led to the swap.
The facilitator, a staffer with the BND, the German foreign intelligence agency, flew a total of 700,000 kilometres shuttling between UN headquarters in New York, Tel Aviv, Beirut and various European capitals, the sources said.
It was not clear if the agent was one and the same as Conrad.
In Lebanon, preparations were under way for reception of the prisoners, with Prime Minister Fouad Seniora declaring a national holiday, a symbolic ceremony at the border crossing, then transfer via presidential helicopter to Beirut International Airport for a formal welcome.
A huge celebration is planned in Beirut's southern suburbs, a hotbed of Hezbollah, where the group's leader Sheikh Hassan Nasarallah is to deliver a speech at 1800 GMT.
Kuntar's hometown, Abey, was decorated Tuesday night with his pictures, candles and signs calling him the "conscience of Lebanon, Palestine and the Arab nation."
The house of Kuntar in Abey, a Druze village south-east of Beirut, was also decorated with pictures and his mother, Siham, was seen putting white flowers all around her house.
"I want to greet him with flowers when he arrives to his home after 30 years," Siham told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.