When Israel swapped prisoners and corpses with Hezbollah this week, a flood of propaganda followed. Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, depicted the return of five prisoners and the remains of 199 Lebanese killed in the 2006 war as a way of achieving Hezbollah's original goal when it kidnapped two Israeli soldiers - an act that ignited the war.
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But beyond all tactical and political considerations, there is something morally repulsive in the hero's welcome given the most famous - or notorious - of the Lebanese prisoners released by Israel. Samir Kuntar had been sentenced to 542 years in prison for killing four people during a raid in 1979. Kuntar executed a father, Danny Haran, in front of his 4-year-old daughter. Then he killed the little girl by smashing her head against a rock with a rifle butt.
This is the creature Nasrallah hailed as a resistance hero, the figure Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh called a "hero who sacrificed 30 years of his life for the Palestinian issue."
All wars are inhumane. But not all warriors lose their humanity.
