By any measure, Israel had paid a high price for the return of the bodies of soldiers Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, who were captured following a cross-border raid by Hezbollah guerillas, which sparked the war.

Hezbollah head-honcho, Hassan Nasrallah, praised Kuntar and lauded the exchange deal as a propaganda coup for his movement. Kuntar, meanwhile, crowed about continuing the resistance against Israel at the earliest opportunity as he basked in the adulation of well-wishers and admirers before a collective assembly of unquestioning and sycophantic regional media.

The Israeli press for its part tried to make a moral victory out of events while several commentators, including ex-president Shimon Peres, insinuated at the superior morality of Israel over that of Hezbollah, and by inference Jews over Arabs.

"There are victory celebrations in Lebanon. They are stepping out with drums and dances to greet Kuntar the murderer who crushed the skull of four-year-old Einat with his gun and shot her father cold-bloodedly," Peres told the assembled mourners.

"In Israel, the nation is in tears. Israel is just, and justice is the true expression of a person's victory. We will bow our heads in memory of the fallen heroes. We will stand upright, as a nation who holds morals dearest, stands," added the Israeli statesman.

Israel accuses Kuntar of being a calculated and cold-blooded child killer who beat four-year-old Einat Haran to death by smashing her head in with the back of a rifle-butt, after shooting her father dead.

The Israelis also say Kuntar is indirectly responsible for the death of Einat's two-year-old sister Yael who was smothered to death accidentally as her mother tried to stifle the girl's screams as the two of them hid from Kuntar and comrades in a crawl space of their apartment.

Hezbollah and other Arab sources have disputed that version of events, saying the girl had a bullet wound in the top of her head, Kuntar himself was shot five times, while several of his friends were shot dead. They infer an Israeli rescue operation that went wrong.

Be that as it may, on April 22, 1979, 17-year-old Kuntar, a Lebanese Druze, led a group of four guerillas who entered Israel from Lebanon by boat. The four first shot dead a policeman who discovered them shortly after they entered Israeli territory

The guerillas then raided an Israeli border town, breaking into an apartment and taking hostage 28-year-old Danny Haran along with his daughter, Einat, while mother Smader and sister Yael were able to avoid the commandos by hiding in the apartment.

Kuntar then took the hostages down to the beach in an effort to escape as police started flooding the area. Eye-witnesses then state they saw Kuntar shoot Danny in front of Einat and then smash the girl's skull in.

The next day, Muhammad Zayden, or Abu Abbas, the founder and leader of the PLF, announced from Beirut that the attack in Nahariya had been carried out "to protest the signing of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty" at Camp David the previous year.

Following Kuntar's eventual capture by police, Abu Abbas, orchestrated the hijacking of the Achille Lauro, an Italian cruise liner off the Egyptian coast, and demanded the release of Kuntar and 50 other guerillas.

During the hijacking, a paralyzed Jewish-American in a wheelchair, 69-year-old Leon Klinghoffer, was shot dead by the hijackers and thrown overboard.

So for many Israelis, Kuntar's release and the subsequent political points that Hezbollah scored both from its strong negotiating stance, following on the heels of the Lebanon War debacle, as well as the Islamic resistance organization's recent consolidation of power in the Lebanese parliament, was a bitter pill to swallow.

But the Israeli government was under mounting domestic pressure to bring the bodies of the soldiers home, both from a pragmatic public and the families of the soldiers.

Jewish law regards every part of a dead body as sacred so following the wave of suicide bombings in Israel, which peaked between 2001 and 2003, the ZAKA, a non-governmental organization, whose complete name means "Identification of Disaster Victims," would comb the pavements, collecting every tiny bit of human flesh or body part for religious burial.

Several Israeli analysts argued that the swap was neither good nor bad, but necessary. Smader Haran, the mother of Einat herself said the good of the nation came before her own personal pain and urged Israelis to move on. She has since remarried and is the mother of two new daughters.

Meanwhile, the family of one of the soldiers, Ehud Goldwasser, including his grieving wife Karnit who had spent the last two years crusading for his release, promised to continue the fight to secure the release of Israeli corporal Gilad Shalit who was captured by Hamas fighters in June 2006 and remains in captivity today.

"We started this process as three families, Shalit, Regev, and Goldwasser. We will continue as three families, until Gilad too returns home," Omri Avni, Karnit's father stated.

Hamas for its part seemed to gain political succor from Hezbollah's strong negotiating tactics. The group's top representative in Lebanon, Osama Khamdan, said in an interview with Al-Jazeera that Kuntar's release proves that Hamas' demand to free 1,000 minors and female prisoners from Israeli jails is a viable stipulation, "and if we wage the battle right, we will ultimately reach the desired result."

But as Goldwasser and Regev were laid to rest, mourners expressed their anger.

"Nasrallah, you will pay," several of the mourners vowed.

And as the coffins were lowered into the earth and displayed on television some 50 mourners gathered at the Regev family home began sobbing and calling for revenge.