“Militant” (???!!) Who Led 1979 Attack on Israel Killed in Syria Hezbollah blames Israel for strike on Damascus suburbBy Sam Dagher in Beirut and Asa Fitch in Dubai
http://www.wsj.com/articles/israels-longest-held-lebanese-prisoner-killed-in-airstrike-in-syria-1450597512
A Lebanese militant who led one of the most infamous attacks in Israel’s history was killed in a strike on a Damascus suburb that the Lebanese group Hezbollah blamed on Israel.
The attack on Saturday night, which Hezbollah said was an airstrike, killed Samir Kantar who led fighters from Lebanon into Israel in a 1979 attack that resulted in the deaths of two young children, their father and two policemen. After almost three decades in an Israeli prison, he was freed in 2008 as part of an exchange with Hezbollah and went on to lead an offshoot of the Shiite militant and political group.
The strike raised tensions along Israel’s northern border with Lebanon on Sunday. Unifil, the United Nations peacekeeping force along the border, said three rockets from southern Lebanon were fired at northern Israel on Sunday night. Two struck land while a third fell in the sea and Israel responded with mortar fire at Lebanon.
Shortly after that, Lebanon’s state-controlled news agency reported that Israeli warplanes had entered the country’s airspace and could be heard in Beirut. But there were no reports of further airstrikes. Israel said it held the Lebanese Army responsible for attacks from its territory.
Hezbollah alleged Sunday that Israeli warplanes carried out a series of precision strikes on an apartment building Saturday night in Jaramana, a regime-controlled district about 3 miles from the center of the Syrian capital.
An Israeli official declined to comment on the allegations.
Israel has targeted enemies on foreign soil many times before. Airstrikes in recent years have killed senior leaders of Hamas, the Palestinian group that rules the Gaza Strip, as well as Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon. A suspected targeted killing by Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, killed Hamas military commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in 2010 in Dubai.
Israeli agents also methodically sought out and killed Palestinian militants suspected of the 1972 Munich massacre of 11 Israeli Olympic athletes.
The Syrian government, which along with Iran is allied with Hezbollah, condemned Saturday’s attack and confirmed Mr. Kantar was killed. But it said it was still investigating whether Israel was directly involved.
Syrian officials said it was a rocket attack rather than an airstrike. And Information Minister Omran al-Zoubi told state media it could have been carried out by an Israeli-linked rebel group.
“Whether the attack was carried out by Israel or its agents, at the end of the day all of them have been fighting the Syrian army and state in the service of the Zionist project,” he said.
Several Syrians were also killed in the strike, Hezbollah said. Among them was Farhan Shaalan, one of Mr. Kantar’s closest associates and head of a pro-regime militia in Jaramana, according to residents and Syrian state media.
At the time of the attack on Israel in 1979, Mr. Kantar was 16 years old and part of a radical Palestinian group known as the Palestine Liberation Front. He led a cell that infiltrated Israel from Lebanon by boat.
The militants killed an Israeli policeman who spotted them, then stormed an apartment building and seized a 28-year-old man and his 4-year-old daughter. Mr. Kantar was later convicted of killing them both, along with the policeman. The man’s wife, hiding in the apartment, accidentally smothered her 2-year-old daughter as she tried to muffle the girl’s cries. Another Israeli policeman was killed in a gunbattle that led to Mr. Kantar’s capture.
Mr. Kantar spent almost three decades in an Israeli jail before he was freed in 2008 as part of an exchange with Hezbollah for the remains of two Israeli soldiers. In return, Hezbollah received four other Lebanese prisoners and the remains of some 200 fighters.
Many in Lebanon accuse Hezbollah of triggering the devastating 2006 war with Israel with a cross border raid to abduct Israeli soldiers for the sake of the subsequent prisoner swap.
After Mr. Kantar and the others were released, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah welcomed them as heroes at a rally in Beirut. Mr. Kantar apparently converted from the Druse religion to Shiite Islam and went on to become the leader of the recently established Syrian Resistance for the Liberation of the Golan in southern Syria—an offshoot of Hezbollah backed by Iran.
The State Department said in September that Mr. Kantar was building “Hezbollah’s terrorist infrastructure” in the Golan Heights with the help of Iran and the Syrian regime.
He survived two recent attempts on his life. A July 2015 Israeli drone strike near the Syrian Druse village of Hader killed at least three members of the Syrian Resistance and two Hezbollah operatives, but missed Mr. Kantar. Another, in 2014, killed four members of his group.
Hezbollah officials and supporters mourned Mr. Kantar’s death, calling him a “martyr” who died for the Palestinian cause. Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television aired nonstop tributes to him on Sunday. In one clip, he was walking through snow and picking up military dog tags etched with the portrait of Imad Mughniyeh, a top Hezbollah commander assassinated in Damascus in 2008 in another suspected attack by Israel.
Mr. Kantar is expected to be buried Monday in a Shiite cemetery in Beirut’s Hezbollah-dominated southern suburbs, following an official Hezbollah funeral. Mr. Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, is scheduled to speak following the burial.
Israelis took to Twitter and Facebook to praise the strike, pointing to the brutality of Mr. Kantar’s attacks.
Footage of the aftermath of the strike aired by Al-Manar and Syrian state television showed what both said was the residential building targeted in the strike. The six-story structure was gutted and residents milled about as a bulldozer sifted through rubble.
Al-Manar said the building was located off the airport road in Jaramana, near a front line where the regime is fighting Syrian rebels. The area is traditionally dominated by Druse and Christians.
Mr. Kantar’s last known media appearance was a September interview on Al-Manar. In it, he denounced U.S. sanctions that had been placed on him that month and his inclusion on its list of global terrorists.
“All these decisions and threats do not scare us, and won’t dissuade us from continuing the path of jihad to liberate our land,” he told Al-Manar.
Shiite-majority Iran is Mr. Assad’s biggest military and financial backer, spending billions of dollars and sending thousands of its own fighters and allied militiamen to Syria to keep his regime afloat. Hezbollah, Iran’s most powerful and best-organized regional proxy force, has assumed a leading role in this effort.
The creation of Mr. Kantar’s Syrian Resistance group, composed largely of Druse, gave Hezbollah and Iranian fighters a base just across the border from Israel. The highly strategic area is about 40 miles southwest of Damascus and borders the Golan Heights, which Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 Middle East war.
“What the martyr Kantar did in the Golan and Mount Hermon unnerved the Israelis, making him their constant target,” said Talal Arsalan, a Lebanese Druse leader allied to Hezbollah, speaking to Al-Manar on Sunday.
Mr. Kantar was also involved in a summer 2015 effort by the regime and its allies to foil a major coordinated advance on Damascus by Syrian rebels.
In a July interview with a pro-Hezbollah channel, Mr. Kantar boasted of his role in creating what he called a new resistance force in Syria against Israel and said it had fired rockets at the Golan Heights in January.
“This resistance has solid foundations now and it won’t be affected if they assassinate us,” he said.
—Dana Ballout and Dion Nissenbaum contributed to this article.
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