BEIRUT, April 28: Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement offered on Sunday to trade Israeli captives in exchange for Palestinian fighters besieged by Israel.

Hezbollah’s al-Manar television said Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the party’s leader, would exchange the prisoners for Palestinian assassins 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.

Hezbollah 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. Hezbollah refuses to give any information on their condition.

Hezbollah, 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, Hezbollah 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.

Israeli forces have surrounded the Ramallah headquarters of Arafat, where the four men have been held since a hastily convened Palestinian military court convicted them of killing ultra nationalist Israeli tourism minister Rehavam Zeevi, who was shot in 2001.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has dismissed the trial and continues to demand the extradition of the men.

In Bethlehem, the Israel siege of the Church of Nativity, where Palestinian fighters took refuge when Israel re-occupied the city, entered its 25th day.—Reuters