Jerusalem  - Israel Monday transferred four Hezbollah fighters to a key high-security jail in the centre of the country, as part of final preparations for a long-awaited prisoners exchange with the Lebanese movement, expected Wednesday.

The four Lebanese prisoners, who were all captured in the 2006 33-day war between Israel and the radical Shiite movement, were moved from the Ashmoret prison, near Netanya north of Tel Aviv, to the Hadarim prison, north-east of Tel Aviv, Monday morning, an Israel Prison Authority spokeswoman confirmed.

In Hadarim, they underwent an identification process and medical checks, and were scheduled to meet with Red Cross representatives, she told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

The fifth, and highest-profile prisoner to be freed, Samir Kuntar, is already in Hadarim.

The five are to be transferred from there to the northern Israeli Rosh Ha'Nikra border crossing with Lebanon on Wednesday, pending final approval by the Israeli cabinet on Tuesday.

The cabinet, however, is expected to vote for the swap in its session scheduled for Tuesday, after it already gave initial approval for the swap Sunday two weeks ago.

The Prison Authority issued a statement, confirming the identities of the five Lebanese prisoners up for release.

In addition to Kuntar, they are Khader Zidan, Maher Qurani, Mahmed Srour and Hussein Sleiman. All four of them were captured on August 16, 2006. Zidan is held as an "illegal combatant," while the other three are on remand for "possession of weapons" and "causing death," the prison statement said.

Kuntar is serving five life sentences and another 47 years for a 1979 hostage-taking in northern Israel, which left five Israelis dead, including two policemen, a father and his four-year-old daughter. The surviving mother suffocated her other, two-year-old daughter to death by accident, as she was trying to keep her from screaming while hiding from the hostage-takers in an overhead boiler space.

Israel over the week-end received the final version of an 80-page report written by Hezbollah on its missing air force navigator Ron Arad, whose plane was shot down over Lebanon in 1986.

The report details Hezbollah's - failed - efforts to track down Arad, who is believed to have died several years after being taken prisoner. It includes attachments with answers to questions demanded by Israel after it received an earlier version of the report, including the names of people who were involved in Arad's capture and interviewed by Hezbollah. The report is to be the focus of Tuesday's cabinet session.

With the report, Israel also received two photographs of Arad, two diary entries and a letter, all from the 1980s, which were handed over to his family. Israeli newspapers Monday printed on their front-pages one of the two photographs, which showed Arad looking frail and bewildered, sitting in pajamas, against the background of a text written in what the media reports said was Arabic and Persian.

In exchange for the five prisoners, and the bodies of some 199 Lebanese fighters and militants buried at an anonymous cemetary in northern Israel, is to receive two soldiers, Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser, whose capture in a July 2006 cross-border raid by Hezbollah sparked a month-long war that summer.

Hezbollah has not permitted the Red Cross to visit the two soldiers, and has issued no sign of life from them since they were snatched. Israeli officials believe them to be dead. (dpa)