Hizballah chief says group will strike back at Israel

Thousands of Hizballah supporters on Monday thronged the coffin of a high-profile Lebanese prisoner who the group says was killed by an Israeli airstrike near the Syrian capital.

The group's leader pledged to strike back  but refrained from making any threats during a speech addressing the assassination.  

Hizballah said Samir Kuntar, who spent 30 years in an Israeli prison was killed Saturday along with eight others in the airstrike on a residential building in Jaramana.  

Hizballah officials had pledged to avenge his killing, sparking fears of escalation in a volatile region.  

Hizballah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, in a televised speech Monday evening, said the group will exact revenge but did not make any specific threats.  

"It is our right to retaliate for (Kuntar's) assassination in the place, time and manner we deem appropriate. It is our right, and I will add tonight, that we in Hizballah will practice this right with the help of God," he said.

Earlier Monday, crowds at Kuntar's funeral swarmed his coffin, which was draped with a yellow Hizballah flag.

"Death to Israel," the men shouted, waving their fists in the air, as women threw rice and petals at the coffin.  

"If the Israelis imagine that by targeting Samir Kuntar they have closed an account, they are very wrong because they know and will know that they have opened accounts that are not closed with a treacherous missile," senior Hizballah official Hashem Safieddine said at the funeral.

Israeli has neither confirmed nor denied that it was behind Kantar's assassination.

In Lebanon, Kantar is known as "the dean of Lebanese prisoners," a reference to his long jail sentence in Israel.

He was imprisoned in 1979 in Israel and sentenced to three life terms, but was released as part of a prisoner swap with Hizballah in 2008 and received a hero's welcome. 

Kuntar was to be buried in the Rawdat al-Sayida Zeinab cemetery that contains the graves of many Hizballah fighters and commanders.  

Hizballah has sent thousands of its fighters to Syria to shore up President Bashar Assad's forces in the country's civil war. More than a quarter of a million people have been killed and millions displaced.

On Monday, the Al-Jazeera news channel said one of its correspondents, Sohaib Al Khalaf, was wounded in Russian airstrikes on the northern Syrian city of Idlib.  

It did not say when the incident took place, but opposition groups on Sunday reported that suspected Russian airstrikes on Idlib killed nearly 50 people and wounded many others.