JERUSALEM—Hezbollah on Saturday announced the assassination of one of its most notorious commanders, Samir Kuntar, by Israeli jets, which rocketed a building on the outskirts of Damascus where he and other militants were staying.
Kuntar was released by Israel in 2008 in a prisoner exchange with Hezbollah after spending 30 years in prison. He had been convicted of the murder of an Israeli man and his four-year-old daughter. Kuntar was said to have killed the girl with a rifle butt after shooting the father. Six to eight other persons were also reportedly killed in the Damascus strike, including Hezbollah field commanders.
Israel neither confirmed nor denied the attack. Questioned by reporters about the Hezbollah announcement as he was entering a cabinet meeting Sunday, Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz quipped "It’s possible that Finnish intelligence was at work here. They did a good job. Kuntar was an evil man."
Hezbollah officials said the rockets had been fired by Israeli planes penetrating Syrian air space, but a Syrian source quoted by Israel Radio said the rockets had been fired by planes over Lake Kinneret inside Israel.
A former head of Israeli military intelligence, retired Gen. Amos Yadlin, said that Israel does not target people out of revenge if they have already passed through a judicial procedure, which Kuntar had. If he was targeted by Israel, said Yadlin, it was because he is currently a central figure in efforts by Hezbollah and Iran to set up a new front by creating terror bases opposite the Israeli-held Golan Heights. Several of the other persons killed in the attack Saturday night are believed connected to the same effort. Last January, an Israeli air attack on two vehicles reconnoitering the Golan border from the Syrian side killed six Iranian military personnel, including a general, and six Hezbollah members, including the two senior persons allegedly involved in organizing the new front.
Kuntar was born in Lebanon but joined a Palestinian militant group in a refugee camp there as a youth. In 1979, at age 16, he led a four-man squad, which landed by rubber boat at the northern Israeli town of Nahariya, six miles from the Lebanese border. He would claim that their mission was to bring hostages back to Lebanon to be used for a prisoner exchange. Killing a policeman, they entered an apartment building and took a resident, Dan Haran, 31 and his four-year-old daughter, Einat, back to the beach at gunpoint. They were intercepted by police and in the ensuing shoot-out two of Kuntar’s comrades were killed. Kuntar and the fourth intruder were wounded and captured. At his trial, Kuntar was convicted of shooting Haran and clubbing Einat to death. He denied this, saying that father and daughter were killed in the cross fire, but a pathologist reported finding brain tissue on Kuntar’s rifle. Meanwhile, Haran’s wife, Smadar, had hidden with their two-year-old daughter, Yael, in a crawl space in the apartment. The mother accidently smothered the child when she tried to keep her from crying out.
After Kuntar’s return to Lebanon, he was feted by Hezbollah and given a senior rank.