Arab media reports on Saturday night claimed that Israeli rocket fire destroyed a building in the Jaramana district of Damascus. dead after reported IAF attack near Damascus, along with 8 fighters
“At 10:15 p.m. on Saturday December 19, Zionist warplanes struck a residential building in Jaramana city in Damascus countryside, ” Hezbollah said in the statement carried by its Al-Manar news outlet. “The dean of liberated detainees from Israeli prisons, brother Mujahid Samir Kuntar was martyred along with several Syrian citizens in the strike.”
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Kuntar, a Lebanese Druze, was involved in kidnap of an Israeli family from Nahariya, and brutally murdered a four-year old girl, Einat Haran, crushing her head with his rifle butt, after murdering her father Danny Haran, in front of her.
Her two-year old sister died when the mother, hiding in a crawl space, accidentally smothered her while trying to prevent her cries from being heard. A policeman also killed is the same attack.
Kuntar spent 29 years in an Israeli prison and was traded in 2008 in exchange for the bodies of IDF soldiers Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser.
Kuntar 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, Times of Israel reports.
Reports said that Kuntar was assassinated not as revenge for his past actions, but rather because he was planning fresh attacks against Israel.
Syrian media said that among the dead was also Farhan Shaalan, a commander in the Syrian anti-Israel resistance group founded by Kuntar and others. Those reports said that senior Hezbollah members were also present in the building at the time of the attack.
The Hezbollah-affiliated Lebanese Al Mayadeen outlet reported that Kuntar had an apartment in the building that was targeted and would occasionally stay there. At the time of the attack, he had been in the building for at least 12 hours, the report said.
This marks the second time that Kuntar was reportedly the target of an Israeli airstrike. In late July, the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights claimed that the Israeli Air Force struck a vehicle in which Kuntar was riding.
But Kuntar later appeared alive and well in an interview which aired on September 9 on Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV and translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).
In September the United States placed Kuntar 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.”
