There was no confirmation that the rocket attacks were linked to the Hezbollah threat.
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Prior to Sunday’s rocket fire, the Israel-Lebanon border has been relatively quiet ever since the war between Hezbollah and Israel in 2006. He said the Syrian government “condemned the terrorist attack against Jermana, which resulted in the death of civilians and Arab fighter Kuntar”.
He and three other men crossed into Israel by sea, and in the coastal town on Nahariya shot dead a policeman before forcing their way into an apartment building, where they seized Danny Haran and his daughter, Einat, 4, and took them to the beach.
Kuntar had earlier spent nearly 30 years in an Israeli jail for leading a deadly resistance operation from southern Lebanon into northern Israel in 1979. The mother, Smadar Haran, managed to flee the house with her two-year-old daughter Yael but accidentally choked the toddler to death when she tried to keep her from crying in order not to be discovered by the terrorists.
“When I heard eight months ago that Samir Kantar was active in Hezbollah in areas north of Israel, I started to worry that he might kill other families and children”.
Israel has not confirmed that it was behind the attack, although officials have expressed satisfaction over Kuntar’s death.
Kuntar, immediately upon being freed in 2008, was welcomed with open arms by Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s representative in Lebanon, Hizbullah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah.
The Israel army allegedly held their Lebanese counterpart responsible for the “attack” originating from the latter’s territory, according to another report by the GVTC.
A series of trails by the Israeli Air Force and the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency was completed Monday morning in southern Israel, the Israeli Defense Ministry said in a statement. “We in Hezbollah will exercise that right”, he said in his address from Beirut.
Official Syrian media said an Israeli aerial strike hit a six-story residential building in Jaramana.
The assassination of Samir Kuntar on December 20, 2015, marks a further stage in Israel’s struggle, so far successful, against Iran’s attempts to turn the Golan Heights into an active anti-Israeli front. Working in accordance with Tehran’s instructions and receiving assistance from Hizbullah, he began building a network of terror operatives for attacks against Israel in the Golan area. While many in Israel were outraged at his release, in Lebanon he received a hero’s welcome and the following year he was awarded Syria’s highest medal by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Today’s announcement also followed the killing of a Lebanese militant in Syria at the weekend in what Hezbollah described as an Israeli air strike. In anticipation of a possible Hezbollah attack, the IDF has stopped patrolling the fence along the northern border.
Thousands attended the funeral, including not only many senior Hezbollah militants, but also Lebanese politicians and leaders of Palestinian factions in the country.
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Information for this article was contributed by Ruth Eglash and Hugh Naylor of The Washington Post and by Bassem Mroue, Josef Federman, Aron Heller, Zeina Karam, Albert Aji, Jim Heintz and other staff members of The Associated Press.
