Israel: Freed Lebanese Prisoner Should Fear for His Life

Jerusalem — Israeli security officials have said that Samir Kantar, the Lebanese murderer who was freed in a prisoner exchange after nearly three decades behind bars, should now fear for his life.

"Every terrorist who committed an act of terror against Israel, especially someone like Kantar, who killed a little child and two other people, is a target," an official said.

Another security official told the Yediot Aharonot newspaper: "Now that he is out of jail, we have no obligation towards Kantar, a loathsome murderer whose accounts will be settled in the end."

Mr. Kantar, who will be 46 next week, was 17 when he was sentenced to five life terms for one of the most notorious attacks in Israeli history.

He was convicted of killing a police officer, a civilian, and a four-year-old girl, whose skull he was accused of crushing with his rifle butt, in a raid in the northern Israeli town of Nahariya.

Mr. Kantar, the longest-serving Arab prisoner in Israel, was freed on Wednesday along with four Hezbollah fighters captured in the 2006 war between Israel and the Lebanese Shiite guerrilla group.

The two Israeli soldiers whose capture by Hezbollah triggered the month-long war were buried with full military honors, a day after they were returned in the prisoner swap.

Ehud Goldwasser was buried in his home town of Nahariya and Eldad Regev in a military cemetery in nearby Haifa, to tears and pledges from politicians to continue to leave no man behind.

"If the worst will happen to any of you, Israel will make every possible and legitimate effort to bring you home," the defense minister, Ehud Barak, said in his eulogy for Goldwasser.

The high price of the exchange — five Lebanese prisoners and nearly 200 bodies for Goldwasser, Regev, and parts of dead Israeli soldiers — has prompted debate in Israel over whether the Jewish state should continue to retrieve its fallen at any cost.