Itongadol.- Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah pointed a finger at Israel on Monday for the air strike that killed Palestinian terrorist Samir Kuntar.
He said that his group has the right to respond for Kuntar\’s death and will do so.
While Israel has not confirmed nor denied that it was behind the strike that killed Kuntar, Israeli politicians have welcomed the death of the man they described as a "brutal terrorist."
Kuntar kidnapped and murdered the Haran family in a Nahariya terror attack in 1979.
In a live speech on Lebanese television, reported by Lebanon\’s Naharnet, Nasrallah said that he and his organization "have no doubt that the Israeli enemy was behind the assassination in a blatant military operation."
He added that "brother Samir had always been a target for Israel."
Kuntar was laid to rest in Beirut earlier on Monday. Thousands of people chanted "death to Israel" as Hezbollah fighters in military uniforms carried Quntar\’s coffin to a Shi\’ite Muslim cemetery in its south Beirut stronghold where he was laid to rest.
Hezbollah "foreign minister" Ammar Musawi vowed to avenge the death of Kuntar, who was killed by a missile attack on an apartment building near Damascus early on Sunday morning.
"The Israeli enemy will regret assassinating Samir Kuntar," Musawi said.
Kuntar was imprisoned after he and three others from the Palestine Liberation Front infiltrated Nahariya by sea in April 1979 and broke into the apartment of the Haran family, where they kidnapped the father, Danny, and his four-year-old daughter Einat. They brought the pair back to the beach and killed them. Haran\’s other daughters, Yael, age two, was accidentally smothered to death as she and her mother, Smadar, hid from the terrorists in the apartment\’s crawl space.
Israel released Kuntar, a Druse, in 2008 as part of a prisoner swap with the Lebanese Shi\’ite Hezbollah group and he is believed to have joined the group since. He was welcomed as a hero in Beirut and he married a Lebanese Shi\’ite woman from a Hezbollah family.
After his release, Kuntar kept a low public profile. But it is believed that he had become a commander in Hezbollah.