CAIRO (Reuters) - Lebanon said on Wednesday two Israeli soldiers captured by Hizbollah would not be released unless Israel was prepared to discuss a prisoner swap. The unconditional release of the soldiers, whose seizure by the Lebanese Hizbollah guerrilla group in a cross-border raid on July 12 sparked a 34-day war, is called for in the preamble to a UN security council resolution that brought about a ceasefire.

The same preamble "encourages" the settling of the issue of Lebanese prisoners detained in Israel."Neither of the two Israeli soldiers will be released unless there are negotiations over the exchange of Lebanese and Israeli prisoners," Lebanese Foreign Minister Fawzi Salloukh told reporters at an Arab foreign ministers' meeting in Cairo.Hizbollah has two ministers in the Lebanese government.

Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said Hizbollah's continued detention of the soldiers violated the Security Council resolution, and that Lebanon must act to release them unconditionally."U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701, on which the ceasefire is based, calls unequivocally for an unconditional and immediate release of the soldiers being held hostage," he said.

A remote-controlled bomb on Tuesday wounded a senior police intelligence officer who played a key role in the investigation into the assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. Security officials said four of the officer's aides and bodyguards were killed and five others wounded in a sophisticated attack in south Lebanon. Lieutenant Colonel Samir Shehade, deputy chief of the intelligence department in Lebanon's national police force, was taken to a hospital in the southern port city of Sidon. His condition was stable, hospital officials said.

Wed Sep 6, 8:37 AM ET, BEIRUT (AFP) – Two Lebanese soldiers working to clear the country’s south of unexploded ordnance were …