Lebanon’s Hezbollah group said on Monday that Israel would be held accountable for killing prominent militant Samir Qantar in an airstrike in Syria over the weekend, and accorded him a funeral of the
Lebanon’s Hezbollah group said on Monday that Israel would be held accountable for killing prominent militant Samir Qantar in an airstrike in Syria over the weekend, and accorded him a funeral of the kind reserved for its top commanders.
Thousands of people chanted “death to Israel” as Hezbollah fighters in military uniforms carried Qantar’s coffin to a Shia cemetery in its south Beirut stronghold where he was laid to rest. “If the Israelis think by killing Samir Qantar they have closed an account then they are very mistaken because they know and will come to know that they have instead opened several more,” Hashem Safeieddine, a senior official in the powerful Shia militant movement, said at the funeral.
Jailed in Israeli prison for his part in a 1979 raid in Israel that killed four people, Qantar was repatriated to Lebanon in 2008 in a prisoner swap with Hezbollah, which he then joined. Qantar, born in 1962, kept a low public profile after Israel freed him. Hezbollah did not say which role Qantar played in the Syria’s ongoing conflict, in which Hezbollah is fighting on the side of President Bashar al-Assad.
Meanwhile, Iran’s foreign ministry said on Monday that Israeli lobbying was behind a new measure passed by the US Congress that will prevent visa-free travel to the United States for people who have visited Iran or hold Iranian nationality. The measure, which President Barack Obama signed into law on Friday, also applies to Iraq, Syria and Sudan, and was introduced as a security measure following the ISIS attacks in Paris and similar attacks in San Bernardino.
