a mournful welcome for two fallen soldiers returned to Israel in coffins and jubilant homecoming celebrations for five militants returned smiling to Lebanon.

The swap underscored the continuing hostility between the enemies two years after they fought a month-long war triggered by Hezbollah's cross-border capture of the soldiers, and it boosted the guerrilla group's standing in Lebanon, where the president and prime minister joined other dignitaries at Beirut airport to greet the released prisoners.

While it provided the soldiers' families and Israelis in general a heart-wrenching sense of closure, the exchange rekindled debate over the wisdom of having gone to war in 2006 and whether the price paid Wednesday could inspire more kidnappings and possibly complicate efforts to free another soldier held in Gaza by the Palestinian group Hamas.

Hezbollah trumpeted the seemingly disproportionate exchange as a victory over the Israelis, while Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert harshly condemned the hero's welcome in Lebanon for freed prisoner Samir Kuntar, convicted of killing a father and his 4-year-old daughter in a 1979 attack remembered in Israel as one of the most brutal in the country's history.

The swap closed a painful chapter for the Israelis, who recovered the bodies of Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, reserve soldiers seized in the ambush by Hezbollah in 2006 that set off the war in which 1,200 Lebanese and 159 Israelis were killed.

The Israelis handed over Kuntar and four Hezbollah fighters captured in the war, as well as the remains of nearly 200 Lebanese, Palestinians and other Arabs killed over the years in clashes with Israeli forces.

As the Israelis prepared for the funerals Thursday of the two soldiers, tens of thousands of Hezbollah supporters gathered at a mass rally in Beirut to welcome Kuntar, who had served 29 years of multiple life sentences, and the other freed prisoners.

The crowd roared as Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, declared: "The time of defeats has passed, and the time for victories has come. This people, this homeland and this country showed a true picture to the world today, to friend and foe: it cannot be defeated."

Kuntar, who wore a Hezbollah uniform and embraced and repeatedly kissed Nasrallah, vowed to "return to Palestine." "God willing," he said, "we shall return, me and my fellow fighters in the heroic Islamic resistance."

The rally capped a day in which events unfolded in starkly contrasting scenes on both sides of the Israeli-Lebanese frontier.

As the exchange got under way on the Lebanese side, Hezbollah official Wafik Safa announced the group was handing over the Israeli soldiers, "whose fate has been unknown until this moment, despite the war waged against us to recover them."

"Now their fate will be revealed," Safa said, and two black coffins were carried from a vehicle and placed on the ground.

The grim scene, televised live, reverberated across Israel, where many had clung to hope that despite government assessments that the soldiers had died in the ambush or shortly thereafter, they might have survived.

"It was awful and terrible to see," Zvi Regev, the father of one of the soldiers, told Israel Radio. "I asked that the television be turned off. I couldn't watch anymore."

Shlomo Goldwasser, the father of the other soldier, said: "It was not easy to see, though it didn't come as much of a surprise. But confronting reality is always difficult."

Outside the Regev home, neighbors burst into tears and lit memorial candles whose number grew steadily throughout the day as visitors came to pay their respects.

As a convoy of army vehicles carried the soldiers' flag-draped coffins to an army base for a private viewing by their families, a red carpet was rolled out a few miles away, in the southern Lebanese village of Naqoura, at a welcome ceremony for Kuntar and his fellow prisoners, who arrived in Red Cross vehicles.

A drum corps welcomed the freed men, and signs above a makeshift stage said: "Israel is shedding tears of pain. Lebanon is shedding tears of joy."

Red Cross trucks carried plain wooden coffins of Hezbollah fighters, Palestinians and other Arabs across the border into Lebanon, where they were draped with Lebanese and Palestinian flags in preparation for burial Thursday.

Among the dead was Dalal al-Mughrabi, a Palestinian woman who led a 1978 attack in which an Israeli bus was seized and 35 passengers killed after a gun-battle with Israeli forces near Tel Aviv.

Hezbollah handed over a coffin with body parts of Israeli soldiers killed in the 2006 war.

Kuntar, who is Lebanese, was in a group of gunmen from the Palestine Liberation Front who landed from the sea at coastal town of Nahariya, killed a police officer and burst into the apartment of the Haran family.

The attackers led Danny Haran and his 4-year-old daughter to the beach, where, according to witnesses, Kuntar shot the father in front of his daughter and smashed her head against a rock with his rifle butt.

Haran's wife, Smadar, who was hiding with a 2-year-old daughter in a crawl space, accidentally suffocated the child with her hand in an effort to keep her from crying out.

Olmert, in a statement released after the prisoner swap expressed revulsion at the welcome given to Kuntar in Lebanon. "Woe to the people that now celebrates the release of a human animal that smashed the skull of a four-year old girl," he said.

The decision to go through with the exchange, even at the price of releasing "a vile murderer" was guided by an Israeli sense of "mutual responsibility, the concern for the fate of every one of our soldiers," Olmert said.

Israel has carried out lopsided trades in the past with militant groups to retrieve captured soldiers, both dead and alive. In 1985 Israel released more than 1,000 prisoners, in return for three soldiers captured in Lebanon in a deal with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command.

Israeli critics of Wednesday's deal warned that it could up the ante in negotiations for a prisoner exchange with the militant group Hamas, which has been holding an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, captive in the Gaza Strip for more than two years.

A Hamas spokesman in Gaza said that the release of Kuntar had broken Israel's refusal to release prisoners serving long terms for deadly attacks, and that Hamas would redouble its efforts to release such prisoners in return for Shalit.

"Israel must pay the price for an exchange," said Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas prime minister in Gaza, who praised Thursday's deal as a "great day for the Arab nation."

Under the deal with Hezbollah, Israel is to release an unspecified number of Palestinian prisoners at a later date.

Although the return of the dead soldiers brought a sense of sorrowful closure to many Israelis, it fueled the lingering debate here over the justification for the Lebanon war, launched by Israel after the two soldiers were seized on July 12, 2006.

"If this is the deal, precisely the same result could have been reached without the war," said Silvan Shalom, a former foreign minister from the opposition Likud party.

Tzahi Hanegbi, a member of Olmert's Kadima party and chairman of the Israeli parliament's foreign affairs and defense committee, said that in retrospect, the swap with Hezbollah had undermined the war's rationale.

"In the end we gave what we could have given on the morning of July 13," Hanegbi said. "Ultimately we are surrendering."

Photo: Released Lebanese prisoner Samir Qantar shakes hands with Lebanon's President Michel Suleiman as Parliament speaker Nabih Berri and Prime Minister Fouad Siniora (R) look on at Beirut airport during a ceremony to celebrate their release from Israeli prisons July 16, 2008.

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