Zionists kill Hezbollah militant

BEIRUT: A Lebanese militant notorious for the murder of three Israelis, including a four-year-old girl, has been killed in an Israeli air raid near the Syrian capital, his Hezbollah movement said.

Samir Kantar was freed by Israel as part of a prisoner swap in 2008, three decades after the killings, and he became a high-profile figure in Hezbollah.
In September, the US 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 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 Shiite militant group said in a statement.
Syrian Prime Minister Wael Halaqi condemned the attack, saying targeting Kantar was equivalent to “targeting the axis of resistance,” referring to Syria and its allies.
Iran, a close ally of the Syrian regime, called it an “assassination” that was a “violation of an independent country’s national sovereignty and territorial integrity.”
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring group, Israeli aircraft had tried but failed several times in the past to hit Kantar inside Syria.
Syrian state news agency SANA released a picture showing pro-government forces standing guard next to a partially collapsed building where Kantar was said to have been killed.
Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked said her country “has not claimed” the strike but “was happy to learn the news.”
Kantar’s brother Bassam confirmed the militant’s death on Twitter, saying: “We are proud to have joined the long list of families of martyrs.”
Kantar and four other prisoners received a triumphant red carpet welcome in Lebanon in 2008 when they were exchanged for the bodies of two Israeli soldiers.
Wearing a Hezbollah military uniform, he waved to applauding crowds under a shower of confetti.
In an interview with AFP shortly afterwards, Kantar said he was more than ever committed to wiping Israel off the map.
“The resistance will end only when the Zionist entity disappears,” he vowed.
Kantar, who had earned the title of longest-serving Arab prisoner in Israel, was still a teenager when he and three other members of the Palestine Liberation Front infiltrated the Israeli village of Nahariya by sea from Lebanon.
The militants shot dead Danny Haran, 28, and battered his daughter Einat’s skull with rifle butts in an attack that shocked Israel to the core.
Kantar was sentenced to five life terms plus 47 years for murdering the father and daughter, as well as an Israeli policeman.