Freed terrorist says he’s jealous of Israel

By · July 18, 2008

Samir Kuntar, the convicted Lebanese terrorist freed this week by Israel, says he’s jealous of the Jewish state.

Kuntar, who spent decades in an Israeli jail after killing a 4-year-old girl and three others in 1979, said Thursday he envied the lengths to which Israel goes to retrieve the bodies of its soldiers, the Jerusalem Post reported.

“I’m jealous of the Zionists, who don’t spare any effort in bringing back captured soldiers or soldiers’ bodies,” Kuntar said in an interview on Al Manar, the satellite television network of the terrorist group Hezbollah. “Seriously, we are jealous of our enemy and its care for a [body] and how it goes to the end of the world in order to return it, and of its concerns for captives and how it will go to the very edge to bring them back.”

Kuntar was released Wednesday, along with four other Lebanese prisoners and the remains of 199 other Lebanese and Palestinian militants, in exchange for the bodies of Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, two Israeli reservists taken captive by Hezbollah in 2006.