BEIRUT (Reuters) - Israel’s longest-held Lebanese prisoner, reviled by Israelis as a man with blood on his hands, will get a hero’s welcome when he returns home on Wednesday.

Samir Qantar, who as a teenager in 1979 took part in a guerrilla raid in Israel in which two children died, is part of a prisoner swap deal between Israel and Hezbollah. Israel is to free five Lebanese guerrillas in return for two of its soldiers captured by the Lebanese Shi’ite group in 2006, whom Israeli Prime Minister has said are probably dead.

“After 30 years of waiting -- I was only a year and a few months old (when he was captured), I never knew him except through pictures and letters. The moment I meet him will be exceptional,” Qantar’s brother, Bassam, told Reuters.

“It’s a moment I’ve always dreamed of and that stayed in my imagination,” he said, adding that fireworks, gatherings and billboards had been prepared to mark his brother’s return.

Qantar, one of seven brothers and sisters, was 17 when Israeli police arrested him. He was one of four Palestinian Liberation Front guerrillas who burst into a flat in Israel’s northern city of Nahariyah and killed a policeman and another man and his four-year-old daughter.

The man’s wife hid in a wardrobe with another daughter but accidentally smothered her while trying to stop her crying.

An Israeli court sentenced Qantar to 542 years in jail.

In the Druze village of Abey, Qantar’s hometown, his family has hung a big portrait of him, along with a poem in his praise.

Hezbollah, which is backed by Syria and Iran, captured the two Israeli soldiers -- Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev -- in a July 2006 raid which triggered a 34-day war in Lebanon.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert at first ruled out talks on their return, but later accepted Hezbollah’s demand for third-party negotiations via a U.N.-appointed German mediator.

BITTER PILL

Although he is Druze, not Shi’ite, Hezbollah made Qantar’s freedom its central demand, partly because an earlier prisoner swap arranged with Israel in 2004 failed to secure his release.

Many say it was Israel’s refusal to release him then that prompted Hezbollah’s decision to capture more soldiers, sparking the 2006 war that killed 1,200 people in Lebanon, mostly civilians, and 159 Israelis, mostly soldiers.

Qantar’s inclusion in the deal was a bitter pill for many Israelis loath to free prisoners with “blood on their hands”.

But Smadar Haran, whose family was killed by Qantar, did not oppose the deal. She said in a letter to the cabinet that he was “never my private prisoner” and she had “no monopoly over pain, suffering or justice” -- a reference to the families of Regev, Goldwasser and missing Israeli aviator Ron Arad.

Clemency for Qantar, whom Israel had described as the last “bargaining chip” for word on Arad’s fate, could also be seen as an admission that the airman’s trail has gone cold.

Israeli Housing Minister Zeev Boim, who, along with two other ministers, voted against the agreement, said: “This is not a good deal. It is not balanced. It releases a living terrorist and others in return for soldiers who are dead.”

“Qantar was a despised terrorist, but was also not important,” Boim added. “But in 2004, we ran up his stock by tying him to information on Ron Arad. We turned this nobody into a symbol.”