Kantar vows to remain with Hezbollah

Five days after his release from an Israeli jail as part of a swap between the Zionist regime and the Lebanese Islamic Resistance Movement, Hezbollah, Samir Kantar is more determined to become a member of the Islamic resistance in Lebanon.

"What I want now is to become a struggler in the Lebanese Islamic Resistance," Kantar said in an interview with Deutsche Presse-Agentur DPA.

Surrounded by his family members, including nieces and nephews, Kantar said, "Two things brought me happiness in the past few days: one is my release from the Zionist jail and the other is the gift I received from Hezbollah, which is the machine gun of the resistance," he said proudly at his family home in the Druze town of Abey, 35 kilometres southeast of Beirut.

Kantar, who turned 46 on Tuesday, received the machine gun as a birthday gift from the Hezbollah command.

Kantar, who unveiled he had received several assassination threats from Israel, stressed that he does not fear for his life, adding he won't give in easily to the Zionist enemy.

"I am taking extra precautions because I do not want to give my martyrdom to the Israelis easily," he said.

Abey residents said since Kantar's arrival, Israeli warplanes have been hovering over the town daiy. But the threats and the planes, did not bother Kantar, who has vowed to put the 30 years he spent in an Israeli jail behind him, and instead focus on the continued armed resistance against the Zionist regime.

He strssed that his praise for Hezbollah was not only because it had secured his release, but because the movement has proven to be the most effective resistance against Israel.

Besides his focus on Hezbollah, Kantar was working on reintegrating into family life, by spending time talking to his nephews and nieces, who keep asking him questions about his days in the prison.

"They ask me questions how I was tortured and how I managed to take a BA in sociology inside the jail," Kantar said.

He totally denied Israeli accusations against him of killing a 4-year-old Israeli girl during his attack in 1979.

"These are purely Israeli accusations which are totally baseless. If you look at all the judicial reports at the time, you see there was no mention of the incident, and that the girl had died from gunfire," he said.

"You can look into the report published on April 23 a day after the attack in the Israeli paper Maarev there was no mention of this horrible story which the Israelis have fabricated, to make me look like a murderer and not a resistance fighter," he said.