Three rockets struck a northern Israeli town near the border with Lebanon, the Israeli military said Sunday. The media also displayed footage of a building that appeared to be destroyed. While Israeli officials declined to comment on the report, both Israeli politicians and the sole survivor of the attack are hailing his death as “historic justice”.
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ROCKETS fired from Lebanon hit southern Israel yesterday, hours after an apparent Israeli strike in Syria killed Samir Kantar, a senior Hezbollah operative who spent three decades in prison for carrying out one of the most notorious terrorist attacks in Israeli history. Kuntar was with a group of commanders from various terrorist groups that were planning attacks on Israel, reports said.
“It would not be in their interest, and if they did so, they would have a big problem”, Amidror said, alluding to Israel’s threats to respond to any major Hezbollah attack with strikes in Lebanon. He then smashed the head of a four-year-old Israeli girl, Einat Haran, with his rifle butt, killing her. Three other Israelis, including her father, Danny Haran, were killed in the attack. Details of the murder made his 2008 release in a prisoner swap controversial.
“Two Israeli warplanes carried out the raid which targeted the building in Jaramana and struck the designated place with four long-range missiles”, the NDF in Jaramana said on its Facebook page. A baby girl was accidentally smothered by her mother as she hid in a cupboard. Kuntar was released from jail in 2008 and officially received by the Lebanese president, Prime Minister, and Speaker of Parliament and a Hezbollah public celebration was held in his honor where he was described as a “Pan-Arab hero”.
State news agency SANA also said that army units and other pro-regime forces had seized control of Khan Tuman and neighbouring farms.
Now, 36 years later, Hezbollah announced Sunday that Kantar was killed in an Israeli airstrike in the Syrian capital of Damascus.
“Samir Kantar was a pivot in the efforts of Hizbollah to prepare the Golan Heights as the next front against Israel”, a former Israeli national security advisor, Yaakov Amidror, told journalists on Sunday morning. Asked why Israel does not claim credit for such incidents, he said it makes it less likely for the other side to retaliate.
The 54-year-old was killed on Saturday night “when the Zionist enemy planes bombed the building where he lived in Jaramana”, southeast of Damascus, the militant group said in a statement.
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Israeli officials did hint, however, that they would act if Israel’s security interests were threatened.
