Occupied Jerusalem: Israeli prison authorities on Monday moved four Lebanese captives to a new facility, placing them with a convicted Lebanese killer in preparation for a swap with the Hezbollah guerrilla group later this week.

All five men are set to be returned to Lebanon on Wednesday in exchange for two Israeli soldiers captured by Hezbollah in a 2006 cross-border raid that triggered a fierce 34-day war. The Israeli soldiers are believed to be dead, although there has been no confirmation.

In the exchange, to be carried out by the Red Cross at a seafront border crossing, Israel will also turn over the bodies of 199 Lebanese and Palestinian fighters killed in clashes over the years.

The Red Cross was bringing in a fleet of trucks from neighbouring Jordan on Monday to haul the corpses, exhumed from a remote graveyard in northern Israel, to the Israeli side of the crossing at Rosh Hanikra.

Early on Monday, a prison service van with tinted windows drove through the gates of the Ashmoret prison in central Israel, taking the four Hezbollah men to the nearby Hadarim penitentiary housing Samir Kantar, one of the central figures in the exchange.

From Hadarim, the five prisoners are to be driven early on Wednesday morning to an Israeli army base just south of the frontier, where they will be held until the missing soldiers are handed over alive or their remains are positively identified, Israeli military officials said.