Samir Kuntar, currently imprisoned in Israel, is a hero in Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority.

And he’s a cold-blooded, remorseless child killer. (Hat tip: WriterMom.)

JERUSALEM — He stares out from a poster like a movie star. Clean-shaven but for his thick, dark mustache, with dark curly hair and piercing blue eyes, he poses on one jeans-clad knee, staring fiercely into the camera.

To Palestinians, and to Hezbollah, Samir Kuntar is a hero, a political prisoner who has spent 27 years in Israeli jails.

A Druze from a small village in south Lebanon, Mr. Kuntar is one of four Lebanese prisoners in Israeli prisons, and is by far the longest-serving of those on record. (Palestinian human-rights activists believe there is another Lebanese prisoner who has been held a year longer, but his detention has never been confirmed by Israeli authorities.) When Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah speaks now of freeing Lebanese prisoners from Israel, it is Mr. Kuntar he is seeking.

But Mr. Kuntar is a killer. In 1979, at the age of 17, he and three others, recruited by a Palestinian militant group fighting an Israeli incursion into Lebanon, launched a small boat from the tip of Lebanon’s southern coast and came ashore at the northern Israeli town of Nahariya. There, they killed a police officer they encountered, before taking a family of four in an apartment hostage.

The mother, Smadar Haran, had managed to slip into a crawl space with her two-year-old daughter Yael and avoid detection. But as police began to arrive, the gunmen took her husband Danny and four-year-old daughter Einat down to the beach, where they shot Danny in front of his daughter and smashed in her skull with a rifle butt.

The tragedy didn’t end there; Smadar’s frantic efforts to keep her little one quiet resulted in Yael’s death from suffocation. …

“Experience tells me there have been many prisoner swaps, and at the end of the day there will be one [involving Kuntar],” said Buthaina Duqmaq, a lawyer and founder of the Mandela Institute in Ramallah, an advocacy group for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli institutions, who visits Mr. Kuntar regularly.

From her bag, she pulls out a half-dozen strings of worry beads — some in the red-and-black colours of Palestine, some in the yellow-and-green of Hezbollah — all made by women in prison as gifts for Mr. Kuntar.

“He is a symbol of the Arab prisoners’ movement. He is very much liked … thousands of prisoners that have been inside Israeli jails talk about him. Even those who have not met him talk about him,” she said. …

“I have never heard him repent. I have never heard him regret. To him, he joined a liberation movement and he is proud of that,” Ms. Duqmaq said.

Previously at LGF:
The World Should Know
The Nature of the Shark