Arch-terrorist and Hezbollah official Samir Kuntar, who was assassinated Saturday night. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Notorious Lebanese terrorist Samir Kuntar reportedly was killed Saturday night in Syria as he prepared a major attack against Israel, according to Western sources and reported by Ynet.

Israeli officials are not commenting, but are suspected of being behind the long-range precision-guided missiles to neutralize Kuntar’s terrorist plans — which were directly financed and supported by Iran. Kuntar was reportedly killed in the Damascus operations center that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) helped set up for the terrorist to coordinate plots against the Jewish State, the Jerusalem Post reports.

Kuntar was 16 years old in 1979 when he and three other members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) sneaked into Israel, killing a policeman and kidnapping a man and his four-year-old daughter, Einat Haran. Kuntar killed the little girl by smashing her head with his rifle butt. Compounding the tragedy, Haran’s other daughter, a two-year-old, was accidentally suffocated by her mother as she tried to keep the girl from crying out as they hid from the terrorists in their apartment.

Upon his release, Kuntar said he regretted nothing and received a hero’s welcome in Lebanon.

Kuntar reportedly became an influential figure in Hezbollah after this release, but may have gone his own way after disagreements concerning attacking Israel. Acting on Iranian orders and working with pro-Assad militias in Syria, Kuntar helped create cells to plant bombs at Israel’s border, fire missiles, and conduct cross-border infiltrations.

The Hezbollah rift allegedly began after Jihad Mughniyeh — son of assassinated terrorist leader Imad Mughniyeh — replaced Kuntar as commander of Iranian-Hezbollah operations in the Golan Heights.

In January, another airstrike attributed to Israel targeted a Hezbollah convoy seeking to attack Israel from the Golan. It included a senior Iranian general and Jihad Mugniyeh.

Even though Hezbollah stopped working with Kuntar, he continued to plan attacks against Israel through his ethnic-kin Druze connections who supported the Assad regime.

The Lebanese Shi’ite terrorist organization feared that a Kuntar-led attack against Israel would invite Israeli intervention that would hinder current Iranian-Hezbollah objectives in Syria. These reports indicate that several actors may have had a reason to kill Kuntar.

Three rockets were fired at Israel from Lebanon following Kuntar’s death, falling into open northern territory. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) responded by striking terrorist targets in southern Lebanon with artillery fire.

Steven Emerson is the Executive Director the Investigative Project on Terrorism (www.investigativeproject.org) where this article first appeared.