Israeli rockets killed infamous terrorist Samir Quntar in Damascus
DEBKAfile Special Report December 20, 2015
Syrian and Hizballah media confirme that Israeli rocket fire from four air force jets early Sunday, Dec. 20, destroyed a building in the eastern Jaramana district of Damascus and killed Samir Quntar, head of Hizballah terror networks in southern Syria and the Golan. Footage showed a multi-storey residential building collapsed and rescue workers digging through the rubble for survivors. In addition to Quntar, Issam Sha’alan, a senior commander of the National Syrian Golan Resistance Organization was also killed. This organization was established by Syrian intelligence for terrorist operations against Israel.
Israel remembers Samir Quntar for the exceptionally vicious murder of a family in Nahariya in 1979. He was released by Israel in 2008 in a controversial swap in exchange for the bodies of two Israeli reservists killed by Hizballah in 2006.
debkafile’s military and counterterrorism sources report that in the last two years, Samir Quntar established a network of terrorist cells in all of southern Syria on behalf of three masters: Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, Hizballah and the Assad regime’s Military Intelligence Agency.
In Tehran and Damascus, his mission was defined as “establishing commando units for special operations.” Those units were in fact hit and terror squads. His territory ranged from Jebel Druze in southeast Syria up to the Druze villages of the Syrian Hermon range and the Syrian Golan including Quneitra. In the past year, he recruited scores of Syrian Druze to fight for Bashar Assad and was able to prevent the Druze community from joining the rebel forces fighting the Assad regime in southern Syria. He was outstandingly successful in thwarting every US-Jordanian-Israeli action for deploying an effective military force to the rear of the Syrian army in the South.
The renegade Druze terrorist additionally mustered Druze recruits to his terror cells in 30 villages on the Hermon opposite IDF positions. These cells were responsible for the intermittent short-range rocket fire into the Israeli Golan and Galilee. They caused slight damage but they were an effective stratagem in his drive to plant is spies in the Druze villages and turn them against relations with the IDF and Syrian rebel forces.
Quntar acted under the direct command of the Al Qods Brigades chief the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, after he was appointed commander of Iranian forces in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, and Mustafa Badr, Al-Din, head of Hizballah forces in Syria.
He was recently promoted to take charge of building a combined terrorist network of Syrians, Hizballah commandos and Palestinians for mounting incursions deep into Israel for major terrorist attacks. His transfer from southern Syria to a high security residential building I Damascus attested to his enhanced status.
On April 22, 1979, at the age of 16, as a Lebanese Druze member of the Palestinian Liberation Front, Samir Quntar perpetrated a vicious terrorist attack in Nahariya that ended in the murder of an Israeli policeman, the attempted kidnapping of an Israeli family and the death of four Israelis and two of his fellow kidnappers.
Quntar and his team reached the northern Israeli coastal town by boat from Lebanon, broke into an apartment building and kidnapped a father, 31-year-old Danny Haran, and his 4-year-old daughter, Einat. He took them to the beach, shot the father in the back and smashed in the head of the child. The mother, Smadar Haran, who hid in a crawl space in the house with her two-year-old daughter Yael, accidentally suffocated Yael to death while trying to quiet her.
Qantar was tried and convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison.
In November 2008, after his release from Israel in a prisoner swap for two reservists killed by Hizballah, Syrian president Bashar Assad presented Quntar with a Syrian medal and in early 2009 he was honored by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. On 8 September 2015, the United States Department of State designated him as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist.
