Thousands of Israelis turned out to attend the funerals of two soldiers captured by Hezbollah two years ago and whose bodies were returned as part of a prisoner swap with the Lebanese militia movement.

At the graveside of Ehud Goldwasser in the northern town of Nahariya, Israel's defence minister, Ehud Barak, declared the country was “heartbroken” after clinging for two years to the hope that the soldiers were alive in Hezbollah captivity.

The corpses were handed yesterday in exchange for the release of five Hezbollah prisoners and around 200 bodies of Lebanese and Palestinian fighters killed during Israel's occupation of southern Lebanon.

In a moving speech, Sergeant Major Goldwasser's wife bade farewell to her husband, whose abduction sparked a bloody month-long war with Lebanon in which some 1,360 people were killed. His funeral took place one day before his birthday.

"Today, this journey of ours is over, has come to its end,” she said. “We, you and I, are moving on to our next journey, the journey of my life ... You will always be my man, eternally young, who walks by me my whole life."

The mourning in Israel was in marked contrast to the celebrations in Lebanon at the release of its prisoners, the most notorious of whom, Samir Qantar, shot an Israeli man to death in 1979 and then smashed the skull of his four-year-old daughter with his rifle butt. The man's wife accidentally smothered their two-year-old daughter trying to keep her silent from Mr Qantar, who was 17 at the time. An Israeli policeman was also killed in the brutal attack.

Israel expressed its disgust at the hero's welcome afforded to the freed prisoner, with some media giving a warning that the Jewish state would, one day, hunt him down and kill him.

Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, said: "Woe betide the people who celebrate the release of a beastly man who bludgeoned the skull of a 4-year-old toddler." The Jerusalem Post newspaper said: "A more undignified and morally offensive spectacle is hard to imagine."

In Lebanon, trucks decorated with flowers carried the bodies of the returned Palestinian and Lebanese fighters from the Israeli border to Beirut, with well-wishers throwing rose petals and rice as the convoys passed. The remains were to be handed over to relatives after a ceremony to honour the dead in the capital.

Mr Qantar and the four other freed prisoners visited the grave of Imad Mughniyeh, the reclusive military head of Hezbollah, who was killed in an explosion earlier this year in Damascus, an assassination which the militia blamed Israel for.

Mr Qantar, dressed in military fatigues, said: “We swear by God ... to continue on your same path and not to retreat until we achieve the same stature that God bestowed on you.”

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