Samir Kuntar, known as the dean of Lebanese prisoners in Israeli jails, has been killed Saturday night in Syria in an airstrike, Lebanon's Hezbollah organization attributed to Israeli Air Force. Born to a Druze family in Lebanon, Kuntar was cared for by a step mother after his father remarried and moved to Saudi Arabia. At 14, he left school and underwent training in the camps of various Palestinian militant groups and became a member of the Palestine Liberation Front. His goal was to take part in an attack on Israel. On January 31, 1978, Kuntar and three additional militants from his organization attempted to hijack an Israeli bus running the line between Beit She'an and Tiberias in order to demand the release of militants imprisoned in Israel. They traveled to Jordan and attempted to cross the Jordan River into Israel. However, before crossing, they were arrested by the Jordanian intelligence. Kuntar spent 11 months in a Jordanian prison till he was released in December 1978 and banned from entering Jordan for three years. On April 22, 1979, at the age of 16, he participated with three other militants in murdering an Israeli policeman and attempted to kidnap members of an Israeli family in Nahariya that resulted in the deaths of four Israelis and two of his fellow kidnappers. Kuntar and his team broke into an apartment building and kidnapped a 31-year-old Danny Haran, and his 4-year-old daughter, Einat, taking them to a nearby beach and killed them. An Israeli court sentenced Kuntar and his friends to 542 years for taking part in the deadly attack that killed three Israelis in 1979. The court file containing the evidence submitted and the court proceedings was declared top secret and no one was allowed to access the file for almost 30 years. During his imprisonment, he participated in a program under which Palestinian security prisoners took online courses from the Open University of Israel, and graduated with a Bachelor's degree in Social and Political Science. He was released in 2008 in exchange for the bodies of two Israeli soldiers captured by Hezbollah in 2006, whose capture sparked a 34-day war between Israel and Hezbollah. His release was highly controversial in Israel, where he is believed to be the perpetrator of one of the most grisly attacks in Israeli history. He recruited Syrians as well as Palestinians and was responsible for a number of attacks, including planting explosives in the Golan Heights that wounded four Israeli paratroopers, one of them seriously, in March, 2014. In addition, Kuntar and his associates fired 107 millimeter rockets at Israel. Kuntar and hundreds of Hezbollah members present in the Golan participated in the fighting in Syria, along with Assad's forces.
