Samir Kantar, a well-known militant leader from Lebanon, was killed on Saturday in an airstrike in the suburbs of Damascus, which is the capital and the second largest city of Syria.
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Kuntar was captured and jailed by Israel in 1979 after he led a terrorist infiltration team from Lebanon to the Israeli coastal town of Nahariya, where he killed a police officer before dragging Danny Haran and his four-year-old daughter, Einat, down to the beach and brutally executing them.
“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 Facebook page said. Despite vows by successive generations of politicians that Kuntar would never be released, he was nonetheless set free as part of the 2008 prisoner swap in which Israel reclaimed the bodies of two soldiers who were kidnapped and killed by Hizbullah.
Over the course of Syria’s civil war, Israel has not shied away from using its air force to hit Hizbollah and Syrian government targets. The son of the Hezbollah’s late military leader Imad Moughniyah was also killed in an aerial attack. Hezbollah blamed Israel for the airstrike and said it would avenge his death.
Kuntar was a Lebanese Druze and a member of the militant Palestine Liberation Front organization, and later became a top Hezbollah official.
“The dean of liberated detainees from Israeli prisons, brother Mujahid Samir Kuntar, was martyred along with several Syrian citizens in the strike”, Hizbullah said in a statement condemning the air strike. Other Israeli officials, including military spokesmen, declined to comment.
Israeli Construction and Housing Minister Yoav Gallant told Israel Radio that he was “not confirming or denying anything” with regards to the killing though he said he welcomed Qantar’s death.
The slain commander, Samir Kuntar, had been imprisoned in Israel for almost 30 years for leading a deadly resistance operation from southern Lebanon into northern Israel in 1979.
Newsweek called the attack “so sickening they give pause even to some of Israel’s enemies”. After that, he took on a senior role in the group, was honored by then-Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and by Syrian President Bashar Assad, and helped to organize Syrian Druze on the Golan Heights and elsewhere into terror cells charged with carrying out attacks against Israel. In July, an Israeli surveillance plane reportedly bombed a vehicle in Syria, killing five men, in an attack believed to be targeting Kuntar.
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SANA did not mention Israel in its report on the strike, which it said killed several people.
