“Lebanon Debate”
Today, Thursday, Israel began implementing a step described as a “goodwill gesture” towards Lebanon, by releasing the Lebanese prisoner Malik Kamal Ghazi and handing him over to the International Committee of the Red Cross at the Naqoura crossing, before transferring him to one of the Lebanese army intelligence offices in the city of Tyre.
However, what initially appeared to be a unilateral release soon took on broader political and security dimensions, after Israel announced that the decision included 5 Lebanese civilians whom its forces had arrested in the areas it controls inside southern Lebanon.
According to Israeli media, the investigation into the five detainees concluded that they were civilians who did not belong to Hezbollah or any armed organization, and did not participate in operations against Israel, which raises serious questions about the reasons for their detention and the legal basis on which Israel relied to keep them in detention.
Until the moment of preparing this news, the confirmed release in practice was limited to Malek Ghazi, while it was not clear whether the other four Lebanese would be extradited in the coming hours or at a later date.
In parallel, the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu revealed that the latter directed the relevant agencies to intensify efforts to locate the bodies of members of the Lebanese Jewish community, whom Israel said were kidnapped and killed by armed groups in the mid-1980s.
The office indicated that recent months had witnessed communications and research operations, some of which were field, in which parties from Lebanon and Israel participated, claiming that progress had been achieved in this file.
The coincidence of the two announcements opened the door to the possibility of an undeclared understanding linking the release of Lebanese civilians to achieving progress in the file of the bodies. However, the Israeli statement did not explicitly say that there was a direct exchange deal, while some Israeli media outlets presented the two issues as part of a single negotiating track.
The step gains additional importance in light of the American efforts to relaunch the Lebanese-Israeli negotiations in Rome, as the prisoner issue constitutes one of the basic Lebanese demands, along with stopping Israeli military operations, withdrawing from the occupied territories and beginning reconstruction.
The most prominent question remains: Does the release of Malek Ghazi represent the beginning of the release of an entire batch of prisoners, or is it part of a broader deal whose details are still being managed away from the public?
