[Photo: People carry the coffin of Samir Kuntar, a Hizbullah military commander killed by an airstrike — for which the group has blamed Israel — in the Al-Homsi district outside Syrian capital Damascus, during a funeral ceremony held in the Hizbolluh controlled Dahiyeh district of Beirut, Lebanon on December 21, 2015. Photographer: Ratib Al Safadi/AA]
Aness Suheil Barghoti
JERUSALEM (AA) – Hizbullah on Monday claimed responsibility for targeting an Israeli army patrol with an improvised explosive device in southern Lebanon’s Israeli-occupied Shebaa Farms region.
“The Samir Kuntar Brigade detonated a large explosive device in the occupied Sheba Farms area, destroying an Israeli military vehicle and injuring all its passengers,” the group said in a statement.
The Israeli army, for its part, said the device had gone off near an Israeli army vehicle in northern Israel’s Mount Dov region.
No soldiers, it said, had been injured in the incident.
Israel responded to the attack with artillery fire into southern Lebanon, the army added.
In a speech delivered last month, Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah vowed to “take revenge” for the assassination of Samir Kuntar, a Hizbullah commander killed in Syria by an airstrike widely believed to have been carried out by Israel.
Kuntar had been imprisoned in Israel for nearly 30 years for leading a deadly resistance operation from southern Lebanon into northern Israel in 1979.
He was finally released in 2008 in a prisoner-swap deal between Israel and Hizbullah.