BEIRUT - Three
months after his release from an Israeli jail in a prisoner swap, Lebanese
fighter Samir Kantar says he is more than ever committed to resisting
Israeli occupation.

"The resistance
must continue ... and I am totally committed to the resistance," Kantar, 46,
said in an interview. "I am ready to take part in any resistance mission."
Kantar is
considered a hero by many in Lebanon, where he was given a red carpet
welcome on his release in July.
He said he
now spends his days mostly in meetings linked to the resistance and was
convinced that Israel was preparing a major attack against Lebanon.
"They don't
realize what we have in store for them," he said, sitting in a seaside
apartment on the outskirts of Beirut.
"Israel is
going to suffer great losses and they will lose for sure," he added. "The
idea that Israel is an invincible, secure state has become a myth."
He said that
even if Israel withdrew from the Lebanese Shebaa Farms territory captured by
Israel in 1967, the resistance would continue.
"The
resistance will end only when the Zionist entity disappears," he vowed,
reflecting his belief in the one state solution, where Palestinian Arabs and
Jews are expected to govern themselves in a united democratic non-Jewish
state.
Recalling
the cross-border raid that landed him in an Israeli jail in 1979, when he
was just 16 years old and part of the Palestine Liberation Front, Kantar
says he has no regrets and denies killing Haran and his daughter.
"I remember
every detail of that night," he said calmly, pulling on a cigarette. "The
father kept insisting on taking his daughter with him and that delayed the
operation for about 10 minutes.
"We were not
interested in the girl," he added.
He said both
were killed by Israeli fire during a fierce battle that took place as and
his fellow fighters tried to flee with the two Israeli hostages.
But the
official Israeli story claims otherwise, setting out to spread a brutal
image of Kantar.
"I just wish
they would give as much importance to the children killed during the 2006
(Hezbollah) war with Israel and the Palestinian children dying every day,"
Kantar said.
Israeli
security officials have vowed to assassinate Kantar but he said he was not
especially concerned for his safety and realized he could never lead a
"normal life" though he hoped to one day marry and have children.
"I don't
live with the obsession that I may get killed," he said.
As to his
most searing memory of the time he spent in Israeli jails, Kantar said it
concerned a prison guard who spoke to him in Arabic.
"He told me
'listen Samir, you are a young man now but by the time you get out you will
have become a burden on society," Kantar said.
"I guess my
message to the Israelis today is that they didn't manage to break me."
Israel waged
a bloody 34-day war on Lebanon in the summer of 2006 after Hezbollah
fighters seized two Israeli soldiers in a deadly cross-border raid that
aimed to free Lebanese soldiers from Israeli prisons. The bodies of the
soldiers were returned in a prisoner swap earlier this year.
The war
claimed the lives of more than 1,200 people in Lebanon, most of them
civilians, and more than 160 Israelis, most of them soldiers.
Hezbollah,
originally a resistance group formed to counter an Israeli occupation of
south Lebanon, had forced the Israeli military out of Lebanon in 2000.
Israel, however, continues to occupy the Lebanese Shabaa Farms. |