Kantar was freed from an Israeli prison in 2008 as part of a prisoner swap, in exchange for the bodies of two Israeli soldiers who had been captured by Hezbollah in 2006.
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On Sunday morning, Israeli jets launched several long-range missiles at a building in the Jaramana neighborhood in Damascus where Kuntar was residing with other Hezbollah commanders.
His brother, Bassam, mourned him on his Facebook page without giving details about his death, but said his brother was a martyr.
Kantar, 53, received a hero’s welcome upon his return to Lebanon in 2008.
A Lebanese-born Druze, Kuntar was a top figure in the Palestinian Liberation Front, and participated in a 1979 raid into Israel. Kuntar and his gang found two members of the Haran family, father Danny, 31, and his four-year-old daughter Einat in their home.
It was this argument, among others, that persuaded decision makers in Israel not to release Kantar in a 2004 deal between Israel and Hezbollah.
Thousands of people have gathered in a Hezbollah stronghold south of Beirut for the funeral of a high-profile militant who the group says was killed by an Israeli airstrike near the Syrian capital.
Israeli defense official Yair Ramati says the test’s timing was unrelated to the tensions.
In the years since, Kuntar, a Lebanese Druse, took up arms again, this time in Hezbollah’s campaign to rescue the beleaguered government of President Bashar Assad in the Syrian civil war.
Nevertheless, Hezbollah legislator Ali Ammar vowed to avenge Kantar’s killing, saying the militant group will not allow his blood to go “betrayed”.
Former Israeli national security adviser Yaakov Amidror said on Sunday that Kantar had been “very active in the north part of the Golan Heights in the Syrian side, responsible for preparing the area for attacks against Israel”.
The three systems incorporate a network of radar-guided interceptors created to shoot down everything from the low-flying, Katyusha-style rockets of Hezbollah and Palestinian guerrillas to the ballistic Shehab and Scud missiles of Iran and Syria.
Over 200 Iranian lawmakers have strongly condemned Israel’s killing of Samir Qantar, a senior member of the Lebanese resistance movement of Hezbollah, in Syria, calling for avenging his blood.
Hezbollah blamed Israel for the death.
WATCH Israel’s “Revolutionary” new air defense system, created to shoot down guided threats, will become operational at the beginning of of 2016. His death allegedly sparked motives for revenge against Israel. The Russian Defense Ministry declined comment. Between six and eight people were reportedly killed in the attack, among them Kantar himself and several Hezbollah field commanders. He noted, however, that several attacks along the Israeli-Syrian frontier in the Golan in recent years were believed to have been carried out by Hezbollah or its allies.
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Hezbollah officials said the rockets had been fired by Israeli planes penetrating Syrian air space, but a Syrian source quoted by Israel Radio said the rockets had been fired by planes over Lake Kinneret inside Israel.
