A Lebanese militant notorious for the 1979 murder of three Israelis, including a little girl, has been killed in an Israeli air raid near Syria's capital, his Hezbollah movement said.
Samir Kantar was freed by Israel as part of a prisoner swap in 2008, three decades after the killings, and he became a high-profile figure in Hezbollah.
Late Sunday, at least two rockets were fired into Israel from Hezbollah's south Lebanon heartland, security sources on both sides of the border said. No casualties were reported.
The Israeli military said it responded with "targeted artillery fire".
One rocket hit northern Israel's Galilee area, military sources said, adding that residents were ordered into bomb shelters.
In September, the United States placed Kantar on its terror blacklist, saying he had "played an operational role, with the assistance of Iran and Syria, in building upHezbollah's terrorist infrastructure in the Golan Heights".
The 54-year-old was killed on Saturday night "when the Zionist enemy planes bombed the building where he lived in Jaramana", southeast of Damascus, the Shiite militantgroup said in a statement.
Syrian Prime Minister Wael Halaqi said targeting Kantar was equivalent to "targeting the axis of resistance", referring to Syria and its allies.
Iran, a close Damascus ally, called it an "assassination" and a "violation of an independent country's national sovereignty and territorial integrity".
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said Israeliaircraft had tried but failed several times in the past to hit Kantar inside Syria.
Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked said her country "has not claimed" the strike but "was happy to learn the news".
"He was an arch-terrorist who killed a young girl by fracturing her skull and had continued his terrorist activities after being freed," she told military radio.
"It's a good thing he met his maker."
The family of the Israeli victims said "justice has been done".
