Kuntar with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah

BEIRUT — An Israeli air strike killed Samir Kuntar, a Hezbollah militant leader, in Damascus on Saturday evening, the Lebanese group and Syrian state media said on Sunday.

Israel welcomed Kuntar’s death, saying he had been preparing attacks on it from Syrian soil, but stopped short of confirming responsibility for the strike that killed him.

A former national security adviser to Israel said he doubted the strike would escalate hostilities between Israel and Iranian-backed Hezbollah, whose last major confrontation was in 2006.

Israel has formally kept out of Syria’s civil war which started almost five years ago but has bombed Hezbollah targets there without publicly acknowledging these sorties.

Hezbollah said Kuntar was “martyred” in an Israeli raid on the residential district of Jaramana in the Syrian capital, but gave no details.

Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah was due to speak on Monday evening as both supporters of the group and Syrian loyalist groups said the death of Kuntar would be avenged and not be in vain.

Jailed in Israel for his part in a 1979 raid in Israel that killed four people, Kuntar, a Druze, was repatriated to Lebanon in 2008 in a prisoner swap with Hezbollah, which he is then believed to have joined.

Yaakov Amidror, Israel’s former national security adviser, predicted Hezbollah would seek to exact “small revenge” for Kuntar’s killing, but said Hezbollah, like Iran, was likely too busy fighting in Syria to afford a new front with Israel. 

“It would not be in their interest, and if they did so, they would have a big problem,” Amidror said, alluding to Israel’s threats to respond to any major Hezbollah attack with strikes in Lebanon.

Hezbollah’s official media said Kuntar would be buried on Monday in a Shi’a cemetery in its main stronghold of Dahiya in the southern suburbs of Beirut. The party opened a condolences hall to receive the public.

“Such acts of the Zionist regime (Israel), which have become a consistent method, are the most dangerous forms of state terrorism,” Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hossein Jaber Ansari was quoted as saying by Iran’s ILNA news agency.

Syrian Information Minister Omran al Zubi pointed the finger at Israel but fell short of blaming it directly.

“The party that gains most from the assassination of Kuntar is the Zionist enemy whom we have long known for these cowardly attacks,” Zubi told Hezbollah’s Manar television station.

Official Syrian media said an Israeli aerial strike hit a six-story residential building in Jaramana.

“I am not confirming or denying anything to do with this matter,” Israeli Housing and Construction Minister Yoav Gallant told Israel Radio, adding: “It is good that people like Samir Kuntar will not be part of our world.”  

Kuntar, born in 1962, kept a low public profile after Israel released him. Hezbollah did not say which role Kuntar played in the Syrian conflict, but Syrian state media said he was involved in a major offensive earlier this year in Quneitra, near the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

Rebels in southern Syria also said Kuntar 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.

The Assad loyalist National Defence Forces in Jaramana, a bastion of government support and home to many of Syria’s Druze minority as well as Christians, mourned Kuntar on its Facebook page.

“Two Israeli warplanes carried out the raid which targeted the building in Jaramana and struck the designated place with four long-range missiles,” the NDF said.

In January, an Israeli strike in Syria killed six members of Hezbollah, including a commander and the son of the group’s late military leader Imad Moughniyah near the Golan Heights.