Hassan Nasrallah, leader of the Iranian-backed terror group Hezbollah, threatened to attack Israelis Sunday in retaliation for the death of the terrorist Samir Kuntar, who was killed in an airstrike on a Damascus suburb on December 19.
“The Israelis should be justifiably worried,” the Hezbollah chief said. “They should be worried along the border, inside [Israel] and outside….The response is coming no matter what…We cannot forgive the shedding of our mujahideen blood by the Zionists…anywhere in the world.” Nasrallah’s vow came six days after an initial threat that he issued at Kuntar’s funeral in Beirut, when he said that “Samir is one of us and a commander of our resistance and it is our right to retaliate for his assassination in the place, time and a way we see appropriate. We will exercise this right, God willing.” In response to these comments, IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot said on Monday that “even across our borders, in the face of the threats heard in the north, we stand ready for every challenge…Our enemies know that if they try to disturb the security of Israel — they will be faced with harsh results.”
Kuntar, who was establishing a terrorist front in the Syrian Golan Heights, was released from an Israeli jail in 2008 in exchange for the bodies of Israeli soldiers Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev. He was imprisoned in 1979 for the brutal murder of two members of the Haran family and an Israeli policeman in the northern Israeli city of Nahariya. In the commission of his crime, he killed the father, Danny, and bashed the 4-year-old daughter Einat’s head with the butt of a rifle against rocks. The mother, hiding in a crawlspace, accidentally smothered her 2-year-old daughter Yael to death in an attempt to keep her quiet so as to avoid giving away their hiding place.
Israeli military officials told The New York Times in May that Hezbollah had moved most of its military infrastructure into the civilian neighborhoods of Shia villages in southern Lebanon, hiding its valuable materiel behind human shields. There are thousands of potential Hezbollah targets that Israel could strike in southern Lebanon, and approximately 400 in a village of 4,000 residents alone (a figure later confirmed by a report in the Hezbollah-linked newspaper As-Safir. “We will hit Hezbollah hard, while making every effort to limit civilian casualties as much as we can,” a senior Israeli military official said, but “we do not intend to stand by helplessly in the face of rocket attacks.”
Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran, has killed more Americans than any terrorist organization other than al-Qaeda, and was the leading terrorist murderer of Americans before 9/11.
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