Weapons fire exchanged across Israel-Lebanon border after militant’s death

As a teenager, he had been convicted for the murder of three Israelis, including a 4-year-old girl.

Kantar spent nearly 30 years in an Israeli prison before he was freed in an exchange in 2008.

The powerful Lebanese Hezbollah group said Qantar was martyred in an Israeli aerial raid on a residential district of the Syrian capital Damascus but gave no details.

A statement posted Sunday on the Facebook page of a Druse militia in Jaramana said the building had been hit with “four long-range missiles”.

He was put behind the bars in Israel for being involved in a raid by Palestine Liberation Front (PLF) in Israel in 1979 that killed five people including two young children.

According to Lebanese newspaper The Daily Star, the rockets were fired from southern Lebanon in retaliation for the killing in Syria late Saturday of a senior Hezbollah commander by an airstrike for which the group has blamed Israel.

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”.

He killed a policeman and kidnapped and killed a man, Danny Haran, and his four-year-old daughter, after they crossed into the northern coastal town of Nahariya by sea from Lebanon. Hizbollah responded ten days later by targeting an Israeli military convoy across the border with anti-tank missiles, killing two. He was long wanted in Israel for the attack, considered one of the grisliest in Israeli history. Kuntar received a hero’s welcome in Lebanon and was eventually received and honored by former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Tehran.

But it is believed that he had become a commander in Hezbollah, which has sent hundreds of its members to fight alongside forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad.

In February 2008, top Hezbollah official Imad Moughnieh, wanted by Interpol over the auto bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, was killed in Damascus.

But some other reactions to Kuntar’s death perhaps reflected the decline of Hezbollah itself in the imagination of the wider Arab and Muslim world since it veered from its usual mission of confronting Israel to instead helping Assad crush a rebellion dominated by Syria’s Sunni Muslim majority.

Israel says Kantar, who was 16 at the time, brutally beat the girl to death by bashing her head with a rifle.

Israel historically has had a policy of quietly hunting down terrorists and Nazi war criminals, with no expiration date to the meting out of justice.

On Sunday, people who support Hezbollah said on social media that Mr. Kantar was a martyr who died for the Palestinian cause.