HIGHLIGHTS: Hizbollah would Accept Mediation.
No Information About Israeli Prisoners' Condition.
Previous Swap Plans Did Not Work.

STORYLebanon's Hizbollah Resistance movement offered Sunday to trade Israeli captives in exchange for Palestinian fighters besieged by Israel.

Hizbollah's al-Manar television said Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the party's leader, would exchange the prisoners for Palestinian Resistance men jailed in President Yasser Arafat's Ramallah compound and other fighters trapped in the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem.

"Sheikh Nasrallah is willing to accept mediation from any party," al-Manar said.

Hizbollah captured three Israeli soldiers in the foothills of the occupied Golan Heights in 2000 and another captive it described as an Israeli colonel who came to Beirut as a spy.

Israel says the three soldiers are dead. Hizbollah refuses to give any information on their condition.

Hizbollah, which drove the Israeli army from south Lebanon in 2000, said in February that Israel had agreed to include Palestinian detainees in a prisoner exchange, in addition to around 15 Lebanese prisoners of war.

But no swap took place. Earlier in April, Hizbollah offered to make a swap involving Palestinian fighters surrounded in the Jenin refugee camp, which Israel later razed as part of a West Bank offensive that began on March 29.

PHOTO CAPTION

Israeli troops patrol their border fence as U.N. peacekeepers patrol on the Lebanese side of the volatile Lebanese-Israeli border, in front of the village of Kfar Kila in south Lebanon, April 16, 2002. A wave of attacks by Lebanese Hizbollah Resistance group on Israeli posts in the disputed border zone since the start of Israel's military assault on the West Bank has cranked up regional tension and drawn threats of Israeli retaliation, leading U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell to visit Lebanon and Syria on Wednesday to urge them to rein Hizbollah in. REUTERS/Karamallah Daher
- Apr 16 6:42 AM