Liberated prisoner from Israeli jails Samir Kuntar martyred in terrorist shelling attack

Damascus Countryside – Samir Kuntar, the longest serving Arab prisoner in Israeli jails, was martyred in a terrorist rocket attack in Jaramana city in Damascus Countryside late on Saturday.

Kuntar, who was liberated in 2008, was martyred along with several people in the shelling that targeted a building in the southern parts of Jaramana city.

The building was completely demolished, SANA reported.

 In a statement to the Syrian al-Ekhbariya TV, Information Minister Omran al-Zoubi described the incident as a terrorist operation “plotted beforehand”, noting that the authorities are carrying out high-level technical investigation to find out how the operation happened.

He confirmed that all of the people martyred in the attack are civilians.

The martyr Kuntar, al-Zoubi said, had always known that he was going to be pursued whether by the Israeli entity itself or by its agents, who are now fighting the Syrian army and state.

Later, the People’s Assembly issued a statement of condemnation in which it said this “classified terrorist crime” against Kuntar stresses once again that the foreign-backed terrorism targeting Syria and the region is a Takfiri Zionist terrorism led by several countries topped by the Israeli occupation entity.

The statement accused some Arab and regional regimes who try to vindicate Israel as being accomplices in implementing the Zionist plots against the Arab nation and the peoples of the region.

Prime Minister Wael al-Halaqi also condemned the operation as “a cowardly act of terror”, stressing that this attack will not prevent the Axis of the Resistance from continuing its struggle against the Israeli enemy and confronting the terrorist war waged on Syria and the Arab nation.

Kuntar, born in 1962 in the Lebanese Abieh town in Aley area, was detained by the Israeli occupation forces in 1979, at the age of 16, for his involvement in a heroic operation against the Zionists. He was released along with four other Lebanese prisoners in a 2008 swap deal with the Lebanese Hezbollah resistance movement in exchange for the bodies of two Israeli soldiers killed during the 2006 war.