Israel hands four more Lebanese civilians to the Red Cross at Naqoura

Four Lebanese civilians held in Israel were handed to the International Committee of the Red Cross on 4 September and driven north through the Naqoura crossing. The transfer completed a five-man release that began a day earlier with Malek Ghazi. Associated Press reporters at a checkpoint south of Tyre watched the ICRC convoy go down to the border in the morning and return to a Lebanese army barracks in the city.

The ICRC said it had, at the parties' request, facilitated the transfer of five people released from Israeli detention. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office said the five were civilians detained during fighting in southern Lebanon, not members of Hezbollah, and that interrogation had found no reason to keep them.

The other side of the bargain

Israel presented the release as a trade for Lebanese help in finding the remains of Jewish community leaders abducted and killed in the mid-1980s, during the civil war. Netanyahu's office called them martyrs and said Israel has given Lebanese officials maps and photographs of cemeteries and other sites. The current request covers what Israeli officials describe as 12 such cases.

US Ambassador to Lebanon Michel Issa and US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee met Netanyahu in Jerusalem on 1 September. The prisoner file was closed there. President Joseph Aoun thanked the United States after Friday's convoy. A similar five-person release was carried out a year ago in the same channel.

Who came home

Besides Ghazi, AP named Hussein Ayash of Harouf and Mohammed Juheir, a fisherman from Naqoura. The other two names were not in the first public list. Lebanese security and prisoner-committee sources told Reuters that 35 Lebanese remained in Israeli detention after the first release, 20 of them civilians.

Dozens of Lebanese are held in Israel, a mix of civilians picked up in the south and Hezbollah fighters captured in the latest war, which is now about six months old. Friday's group was chosen because Israel had classified them as civilians. That classification is why the deal could be framed as a goodwill step rather than a prisoner-of-war exchange.

What it does not settle

The ICRC noted that many families in Lebanon still have no answer about relatives who may be detained, dead or missing. The 1980s Jewish cases sit on the other side of that same sentence. Neither list is closed by five living men crossing at Naqoura.

The release is the first of its kind since the current Israel-Hezbollah war began. It is also small. It does not reopen a ceasefire text and it does not return the remains Israel says it is seeking. It does show that Washington's ambassadors can still move a discrete file between Jerusalem and Beirut while the wider front stays open.

The next test is whether Lebanon produces the cemetery work Israel asked for, and whether any of the 20 civilians still counted in Israeli lock-up follow the same road through Naqoura.