Families of Kuntar's victims enraged at swap

As the Goldwasser and Regev families finally received closure on Wednesday, the families who had to see the murderers of their loved ones go free said they felt humiliated, angry and disappointed.

They said they couldn't watch the government handing over terrorists who would kill again, for two dead soldiers - especially when the state did not have any information on the soldiers' condition ahead of the exchange.

"I understood today what sort of a person leads Israel - a person who disgraces us and the entire Israeli people," said Yoram Shahar, brother of Eliyahu Shahar, the policeman murdered by terrorist Samir Kuntar in a 1979 attack in Nahariya. "The prime minister needs to resign from his position and hand the reins to someone else, someone more competent who cares about this country,"

In that same attack, Kuntar also murdered Dan Haran, 31, and his four-year-old daughter, Einat. The Harans' younger daughter, Yael, was smothered to death as her mother, Smadar - the sole survivor of the incident - tried to keep her quiet so the terrorists wouldn't find their hiding place.

On Wednesday, as Israel handed Kuntar - who was serving four life sentences - over to Lebanon, the families felt abandoned.

"It's not too late to stop this deal," Shahar told The Jerusalem Post Wednesday afternoon, before the two soldiers' bodies were positively identified. "I can't understand how Israel agreed to this sort of a deal... At first I thought the soldiers were alive, and so I thought we could take this humiliation if one of our soldiers came back alive. But when I understood that the government didn't know their condition, [I no longer supported the deal]."

The deal, Shahar said, "is bad, and it will bring us more dead soldiers and bad deals. We shouldn't have negotiated with a terrorist organization like Hizbullah, because by doing it we actually legitimize them. It's time we start speaking their language."

Dan Haran's brother, Roni Keren, a 55-year-old insurance agent and water polo coach from Kiryat Tivon, said the swap made him feel ashamed.

"And this is not just me - many people call us and tell us that they're embarrassed to see this government setting these terrorists free," he told the Post.

"This humaneness will kill us all," Keren said. "It is
unprecedented that these terrorists live here at our expense, study and have a normal community life [in jail], and then they are freed to carry out more terrorist attacks. We face a cruel enemy, and we need to think of changing the way we handle them."

Keren said the family had gone to his brother's grave on Wednesday during the long hours of the prisoner swap.

"We couldn't sit home and watch them handing Hizbullah the murderer of my brother," he said. "We told Dan that we were sorry that we didn't do enough to stop this deal, and we should have."