A Lebanese militant notorious for the murder of three Israelis, including a four-year-old girl, has been killed in an Israeli air raid near the Syrian capital, Hezbollah said.
Samir Kantar was freed by Israel as part of a prisoner swap in 2008, three decades after the killings, and he became a high-profile figure in Hezbollah.
He was killed on Saturday night “when the Zionist enemy planes bombed the building where he lived in Jaramana,” southeast of Damascus, the Lebanese Shiite militant group said in a statement.
In September the United States placed Kantar 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”.
Kantar, who had earned the title of longest-serving Arab prisoner in Israel, was still a teenager when he and three other members of the Palestine Liberation Front infiltrated the Israeli village of Nahariya by sea from Lebanon.
He was sentenced to five life terms plus 47 years for murdering Danny Haran, his daughter Einat and an Israeli policeman.