Brace for retaliation over Qantar’s death, Hezbollah tells Israel

BEIRUT, Lebanon: Hezbollah’s leader said on Sunday that Israel miscalculated by killing prominent militant Samir Qantar in Syria last week, saying that retaliation for his death was inevitable whatever the consequences.
Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, speaking in a ceremony to mark a week since Qantar’s death, said Israelis should brace themselves for a response either inside Israel or outside.
“The response is coming no matter what... We cannot forgive the shedding of our mujahideen blood by the Zionists...anywhere in the world,” he said. Israel has welcomed Qantar’s death, but has not confirmed it carried out the air strike that killed him eight days ago.
Hezbollah accorded Qantar 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 Shiite Muslim 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 Shiite 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 Assad. But Syrian state media said he was involved in a major offensive earlier this year in Quneitra, near the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
In January, an Israeli air strike in Syria killed six members of Hezbollah, including a commander and the son of the group’s late military chief Imad Moughniyah near the Golan. (



(Reporting by Laila Bassam)