Samir Kuntar

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Samir Kuntar (Arabic: سمير القنطار, also transcribed Sameer, Kantar, Quntar, Qantar; 20 July 1962 – 19 December 2015) was a Lebanese militant who was a member of the Palestinian Liberation Front (PLF). In 1979, he took part in the Nahariya attack in Israel, for which an Israeli court would convict him of murder and terrorism. He was eventually released as part of the 2008 Israel–Hezbollah prisoner exchange. Samir Kuntar was born to a Druze family in Lebanon and joined Palestinian militants in Lebanon at a young age. In 1979 at the age of 16, Kuntar and three other PLF militants snuck into Nahariya, Israel, by boat. Their goal was to capture Israelis and force Israel into a prisoner exchange, but the "raid went horribly wrong". In the end, two Israeli police officers and two Israeli civilians were dead, as were two of the PLF members. Kuntar denied killing the Israeli civilians and said they had been killed by Israeli forces as they shot at him and the PLF militants. But Israeli authorities accused Kuntar of murdering two Israeli civilians, a father and his four year old daughter, in cold blood, and an Israeli court convicted Kuntar of murder. Thus, Kuntar came to be "reviled as a child-murdering monster in Israel". After Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000, Hezbollah began to campaign for the release of all Lebanese citizens from Israel. Israel's refusal to release Kuntar (and other Lebanese citizens) was cited as the justification for the 2006 Hezbollah cross-border raid, which lead to the 2006 Lebanon War. After the war, Kuntar was released from prison as part of the 2008 Israel–Hezbollah prisoner exchange. His arrival in Lebanon was greeted by crowds of tens of thousands of people, as well as Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Sinora. He continued to be...