Rocket attacks on Israel from Lebanon: Security sources

Lebanese Hizbollah militant leader Samir Qantar was killed in an Israeli air strike in Damascus, the Lebanese group and Syrian government sources said.

In 2008, he was freed along with four other Lebanese militants and the bodies of approximately 200 others following a deal between Israel and Hizbollah in exchange for the dead bodies of the two Israeli soldiers whose capture triggered the Israel-Lebanon war in 2006. Haran’s two-year-old daughter also died when his wife, Smadar, accidentally smothered her while trying to stifle her cries from the crawlspace where they were hiding.

“It is good that people like Samir Kuntar will not be part of our world”, one member of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet told Israel Radio.

The last time rockets hit the northwest area of Western Galilee was in July 2014, during Israel’s military campaign against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, known as Operation Protective Edge.

His brother Bassam Kantar had earlier mourned him on his Facebook page without giving details about his death, but said his brother was a martyr.

The Israelis released him in 2008 as part of a prisoner swap with the Shiite Hezbollah militia in Lebanon. “Forces are searching the area”, it said.

Meanwhile, state media in Syria has blamed terrorist groups for the attack.

An Israeli official has since welcomed the death, but would not confirm if it was Israeli officials who did in fact carry out the attacks, reported the BBC. There was no immediate remark from Israel.

There has not been any official comment on the attack from Israeli officials.

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

Rebels in southern Syria also said Qantar was present in battles this year to defend a Syrian air base near the Druze majority city of Sweida, close to the border with Jordan, that rebels sought to capture.

Syrian Prime Minister Wael Halaqi equated the killing of Kuntar to “targeting the axis of resistance”, referring to Syria and its allies. 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.

The airstrike showed Israel’s continued commitment to go to great lengths to eliminate their enemies and its willingness to go it alone in bombing pro-government targets in Syria.

Kuntar spent 29 years in jail for the 1979 murder of a father and his four-year-old daughter on an Israeli beach.