The deal also calls for Israel to release scores of Palestinian prisoners at a later date as a gesture to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
HEZBOLLAH READY TO CELEBRATE
Hezbollah has dubbed the exchange "Operation Radwan", in honour of "Hajj Radwan", or Imad Moughniyah, the group's military commander who was assassinated in Syria in February.
Yellow Hezbollah flags and banners fluttered across south Lebanon and along the coastal highway from the border village of Naqoura to the capital, Beirut. "Liberation of the captives: a new dawn for Lebanon and Palestine," one banner read.
Israel denounced the planned festivities.
"Samir Qantar is a brutal murderer of children and anybody celebrating him as a hero is trampling on basic human decency," Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's spokesman Mark Regev said.
For some Lebanese, the exchange demonstrated the futility of the devastating conflict with Israel two summers ago.
"There shouldn't have been a war in 2006. A lot of lives were lost," said Rami Nasereddine, an 18-year-old student in downtown Beirut. "It's good that the prisoner exchange is taking place. Israel should have done that two years ago."
The Palestinian Islamist group Hamas said the prisoner swap strengthened its own position in demanding the release of hundreds of long-serving prisoners in exchange for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier captured two years ago near the Gaza Strip.
"This is a great victory to the resistance and to Hezbollah and it is a festival for the Lebanese prisoners and their families," Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri said in Gaza.
Israeli President Shimon Peres set the prisoner swap in motion on Tuesday by pardoning Qantar, reviled in Israel for his role in the 1979 attack. Qantar, aged 17 at the time, has said the father was shot by Israeli soldiers who also wounded him, and that he doesn't remember what happened to the girl.
Peres said he felt "bitter and unbearable pain" at the decision, but that Israel was obliged to retrieve its soldiers.
Olmert had described Qantar as the last bargaining chip for word on Israeli airman Ron Arad, missing since he bailed out over Lebanon in 1986. Israel said a report supplied by Hezbollah on Arad as part of the swap had failed to clarify his fate.
The other Lebanese prisoners being freed along with Qantar, a Druze, were named as Maher Qorani, Mohammad Srour, Hussein Suleiman and Khodr Zeidan. They were to be welcomed with rallies and fireworks in Lebanon, which declared a public holiday.
