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Hamas leader in Gaza Ismail Haniyeh paid a visit on Wednesday (July 16) to the house of Um Jaber Wshah, who is known as the 'Palestinian mother of Samir al-Qantar', a Lebanese prisoner set to be released by Israel as part of a prisoners swap deal. In a deal mediated by a U.N.-appointed German intelligence officer, Israel was to free Qantar and four other prisoners, in return to the bodies of two Israeli soldiers kidnapped two years ago. Qantar had been serving a life prison term for the deaths of four Israelis, including a four-year-old girl and her father, in a 1979 Palestinian guerrilla attack on a northern Israeli town. Um Jaber Wshah, received dozens of congratulators at her house in Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza Strip. Wshah visited Samir al-Qantar along with her jailed son for 15 years in Israeli prisons. She also used to visit Arab prisoners jailed by Israel. After her son was released in 1999, Um Jaber took the Israeli state to court after they rejected her request to see Qantar. In 2000 she saw him for the last time before Israel stopped the visits. Haniyeh said at Wshah's house that Qantar's release represented a victory to the resistance against the Israeli occupation. "We, as Palestinian people will never abandon our prisoners. We will not abandon our heroes. Just like there was an honourable swap today with the resistance in Lebanon we are determined to reach an honourable deal for our prisoners in the Israeli occupation prisons," he added. Um Jaber congratulated the Lebanese and Palestinian people. "May they all be liberated, this is real joy," she said. Also in Gaza, Senior Islamic Jihad leader Nafez Azzam said that a prisoner swap with Hezbollah proved that resistance was the only and efficient way against the "Zionist enemy". "We feel like any achievement reached by the resistance in Arab areas and the Muslim areas is an achievement for us here in Palestine, because any victory which happens anywhere in the Arab and Islamic world is a reinforcement for our resistance," said Azzam. Celebrations were not limited to Gaza on Wednesday, hundreds of Palestinians, most of them teenagers, took to the streets of the West Bank city of Ramallah, holding flags and posters. The youths danced, the Dabka, a Palestinian traditional dance usually performed at weddings and celebrations. The deal is viewed as a triumph by the Lebanese guerrilla group and as a painful necessity by many Israelis, two years after the soldiers' capture sparked a 34-day war with Hezbollah that killed about 1,200 people in Lebanon and 159 Israelis. Hezbollah's al-Manar TV showed two black coffins being taken from a vehicle at the Israel-Lebanon border after Hezbollah security official Wafik Safa disclosed for the first time that army reservists Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev were dead. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) took the coffins and drove them into Israel. An ICRC truck later drove into Lebanon with the bodies of eight Hezbollah fighters killed during the 2006 war. Israel will also hand over the remains of nearly 200 Arabs killed trying to infiltrate northern Israel. Hezbollah will return the remains of Israeli soldiers killed in south Lebanon.