At least three rockets landed early Sunday evening in open areas near the northern city of Nahariya in the Western Galilee, only hours after an alleged IDF airstrike killed Lebanese terrorist Samir Kuntar, who had been previously jailed in Israel for his part in the 1979 murders of a family.
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Hezbollah, a Shi’ite militia and political movement, swiftly blamed Israel for the assault, but Israeli officials had no comment.
Lebanese broadcaster Al-Mayadeen reported that the attack was conducted by two Israeli aircraft that hovered close to the Israeli-Syrian border area of Lake Tiberias before firing four missiles toward Jaramana, a stronghold of the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad.
Israel has repeatedly carried out airstrikes in Syria, claiming it was targeting Hezbollah-bound weapons.
Reports said that Kuntar was assassinated not as revenge for his past actions, but rather because he was planning fresh attacks against Israel. His release was highly controversial in Israel, where he is believed to have been the perpetrator of one of the most grisly attacks in Israeli history.
As a teenager, Kantar joined a Palestinian militant group known as the “Palestine Liberation Front” at the height of Palestinian-Israeli violence in the Middle East and at a time when most Palestinian groups were based in Lebanon.
A former national security adviser to Israel said he doubted the strike would escalate hostilities between Israel and Iranian-backed Hezbollah, whose last major confrontation was in 2006.
Lebanon’s media outlet, Al-Manar reports, “Israeli warplanes struck the building with four long-range missiles, causing complete destruction of the building and partial damage to the surrounding structures”.
Samir Kantar was freed by Israel as part of a prisoner swap in 2008, three decades after the killings, and he became a high-profile figure in Hezbollah. The child’s mother, who took refuge in a crawlspace, accidentally smothered her other daughter trying to silence her cries, Israel has said. Kantar had always denied killing the girl or her father.
Under the cover of night, the group broke into an apartment in the coastal town of Naharia, just 10 kilometres away from the Lebanese border, and kidnapped an Israeli man, Danny Haran, and his four-year-old daughter, Einat.
“We have no idea who killed Samir Kuntar but whoever it was should be thanked by all of Israel”, said Avigdor Liberman, head of the opposition Yisrael Beitenu party and a member of parliament’s foreign affairs and defense committee.
In a Sunday statement, the Lebanese armed group declared that Kuntar had been “martyred” in a “Zionist airstrike”.
The father was shot and his eldest daughter was reportedly bludgeoned to death by Mr Kuntar himself, aged 16 at the time, who was captured in a shoot-out and sentenced to five life terms of imprisonment.
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In January, an Israeli strike in Syria killed six members of Hezbollah, including a commander and the son of the group’s late military leader Imad Moughniyah in the province of Quneitra, near the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
