Arab media reports on Saturday night claimed that Israeli rocket fire destroyed a building in the Jaramana district of Damascus.
According to Russia Today, Hezbollah-linked terrorist Samir Kuntar was the target of the strike and was reportedly killed.
Images from the scene show a collapsed multi-storey residential building, with lots of rubble on the ground. Vehicles parked nearby appear to have been completely destroyed, the Russian news agency reported.
According to Reuters, a number of rockets indeed hit a building in the Damascus district of Jaramana causing several casualties, but Syria’s state media blamed “terrorist groups” – the term used by Bashar Al-Assad regime to describe rebels fighting against him – for the attack.
However, government loyalists quoted by Reuters on social media said the explosions were an Israeli strike believed to have killed Kuntar, who murdered two members of the Haran family in the northern Israeli city of Nahariya in 1979, crushing the four-year old’s head with the butt of his rifle after murdering her father in front of her. Her two-year old sister died when the mother, hiding in a crawl space, accidentally smothered her while trying to prevent her cries from being heard. He was released in 2008 as part of a prisoner swap with Hezbollah.
Some Syrian government loyalists said he was in the building at the time of the attack but his fate was unclear, according to the news agency, but it was not immediately possible to confirm the reports.
This marks the second time that Kuntar was reportedly the target of an Israeli airstrike. In late July, the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights claimed that the Israel Air Force struck a vehicle in which Kuntar was riding.
But Kuntar later appeared alive and well in an interview which aired on September 9 on Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV and translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).
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