Hezbollah announces death of militant leader Samir Qantar

The rocket fire Sunday comes after Samir Kantar, a fighter from the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah who carried out one of the most notorious attacks in Israel, was killed in Syria in an airstrike.

He was released in 2008, in exchange for bodies of two Israeli soldiers who were killed by Hezbollah in 2006.

Avi Issacharoff offered a similar assessment of Kuntar’s role in The Times of Israel on Sunday, writing, “Kuntar, who was Druze, is credited with having salvaged Hezbollah’s terror network on the Syrian Golan Heights”.

In this photo released Sunday, Dec. 20, 2015, by the Syrian official news agency SANA, Syrian soldiers stand in front of a damaged building where Samir Kuntar was believed to be killed along with several others Saturday night in the Damascus suburb of Jaramana, Syria. He denies this deed, claiming that the girl was killed in the crossfire. He took them to a nearby beach and killed them – while mother Smadar hid in a closet and accidentally smothered her two-year-old to death. In response to the attack, the IDF fired eight mortar shells at the area from which the rockets were launched.

Lebanon says most of those killed were civilians, while Israel says 600 of the dead were Hezbollah militants.

There was no direct confirmation from Israel, which generally does not comment on air strikes inside Syria.

Isaac Herzog, head of Israel’s opposition Labor Party, described Kuntar’s assassination as a “historical justice”, which, he said, would serve to enhance regional security. “If Israel hasn’t learned from all of its failed attempts to assassinate senior commanders, then it ought to know it committed a new stupid act by assassinating Kuntar”.

In a Sunday statement, the Lebanese armed group declared that Kuntar had been “martyred” in a “Zionist airstrike”.

Nasrallah also appeared to respond to the increasing of US sanctions on Hezbollah by US President Barack Obama on Friday, saying that the US has had “us on the list of terrorism since 1995, and for decades they have tried to impose this label on us, but they failed”. Kantar was 16 at the time, and a member of the Palestinian militant group the Palestine Liberation Front.

According to al-Mayadeen, a television channel in Lebanon, Israeli jets did not violate Syrian air space in the strike, raising the possibility that the attack was conducted from the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights or even from Lebanese airspace.

There was no confirmation from Israel that it was responsible for Kantar’s killing. The Assad loyalist National Defence Forces in Jaramana, a bastion of government support and home to many of Syria’s Druze minority as well as Christians, mourned Qantar on its Facebook page.

With the help of Russian airstrikes that began on September 30, Shia fighters from Iran and Hezbollah, alongside the Syrian army, have retaken some serious ground in recent months.