Although Al-Manar said Israeli warplanes violated Syrian airspace, the Lebanon-based Al-Mayadeen TV station, which is close to Hezbollah and the Syrian government, said two Israeli warplanes fired the four missiles while flying over northern Israel.
Advertisement
Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah was due to speak on Monday evening as both supporters of the group and Syrian loyalist groups said the death of Quntar would be avenged and not be in vain.
Israeli officials praised the assassination, though were unable to confirm whether Israel was responsible for the attack.
Israel held on to Kantar for decades, hoping to use him as a bargaining chip to win new information about an Israeli airman whose plane crashed in Lebanon in 1986.
“If after he was released he’d gone to live a quiet life with his family in Lebanon then I don’t think anyone would have the goal to kill him, but Samir Kuntar made many enemies, not just in Israel”, she said. In 1985, four members of the PLF hijacked the Achille Lauro cruise ship sailing from Alexandria, Egypt to Ashdod, in southern Israel, in an attempt to gain negotiating power for Kuntar’s release.
Speaking to Army Radio on Sunday, Smadar Haran hailed the alleged Israeli airstrike as “historic justice”.
“There are no civilian targets – it’s “civilian” in quotation marks”, Kantar said, adding: “The Zionists themselves define the Israeli as a soldier who is on leave for 11 months every year”. In 1979 Kuntar and three Palestine Liberation Front operatives shot 31 year old Danny Haranin the back of the head in front of his four year old daughter after which he smashed the little girl’s head into the rocks and used his rifle butt to crush her skull.
The airstrike was the latest in a series of suspected Israeli attacks on Hezbollah gunmen and convoys in Syria, where the militant group is supporting President Bashar al-Assad in the civil war.
The rocket fire from the Hezbollah heartland of south Lebanon followed the death of Samir Kantar, a militant in the Shiite group notorious for the murder of three Israelis.
Kuntar was a military commander in the Lebanese Hezbollah group.
The Associated Press reported that six other people also were killed in the strike in Jaramana, a neighborhood with an ethnically and religiously mixed population that includes many Druse and Christians, but which has become overcrowded with Syrians displaced from other areas.
In September, the United States placed Kantar on its terror blacklist, saying he had “played an operational role, with the assistance of Iran and Syria, in building up Hezbollah’s terrorist infrastructure in the Golan Heights”. The two had been hiding in a closet and Haran Kaiser accidently smothered Yael to stop Kuntar from hearing her cries.
Advertisement
While steering away from taking responsibility, many Israeli leaders praised the news of Kuntar’s death. He was traded for the remains of Israeli soldiers who had been captured and killed by Hezbollah.
