1979 Nahariya attack

Arrival On 22 April 1979, a group of four Palestinian Liberation Front (PLF) militants entered Israel from Lebanon by boat. The group was headed by Samir Kuntar (born in 1962) and included Abdel Majeed Asslan (born in 1955), Mhanna Salim Al-Muayed (born in 1960) and Ahmed al-Abras (born in 1949) – all PLF members of the under the leadership of Abu Abbas. The group departed from the seashore of Tyre in Southern Lebanon using a 55 horse-powered motorized rubber boat with an 88 km/h speed. Their goal was to attack Nahariya, 10 kilometers away from the Lebanese border. Around midnight they arrived at the coastal town of Nahariya. Killing of Eliyahu Shahar Upon landing on the beach in Nahariya, the group followed instructions issued in Beirut – which included finding a police officer and killing him. Next, Kuntar's group encountered Moshe Sasson, a resident who was trying to reach the building's bomb shelter carrying his two young daughters, one under each arm. Kuntar shoved Sasson and slammed a handgun into the back of his skull. However, Sasson escaped when the hall lights suddenly went out, and hid under a parked car. {{ cite news | title = Prisoner Swap Stirs Raw Memories In Israel | url = http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/07/16/world/main4264297.shtml | work = CBS News url = https://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A2740-2003May17 | title = The World Should Know What He Did to My Family| date = 18 May 2003| newspaper = The Washington Post | author = Smadar Haran Kaiser Shootout on the beach Kuntar's group then took Danny and Einat down to the beach, where a shootout erupted with Israeli policemen and a squad of soldiers from the elite Sayeret Golani special forces unit. According to eyewitnesses, when Kuntar's group found that the rubber boat they'd arrived in was disabled by gunfire, Kuntar shot Danny at close range in the back, in front of his daughter, and drowned him in the sea to ensure he was dead. Next, according to forensic evidence and eyewitness court testimony, Kuntar killed the girl by smashing her skull against the rocks with the butt of his rifle. A second militant, Mhanna Salim Al-Muayed, was killed in the shootout on the beach. Kuntar and the fourth member of the group, Ahmed Assad Abras, were captured. Fatalities The four Israeli victims of the attack were: • Police officer Eliyahu Shahar (24 years old). • Danny Haran (32 year-old). • Einat Haran, Danny's 4-year-old daughter. • In addition, Danny's other daughter, two-year-old Yael, was accidentally suffocated by her mother, who was trying to keep the young girl quiet as they hid from the militants. ==Retaliation==

The day after the attack, Israeli Navy gunboats bombarded Nahr el-Bared, a Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut described by an Israeli military spokesman as a major base for the PFLP. The bombardment lasted an hour, and three civilians were reportedly killed. On 19 December 2015, Kuntar was killed by an explosion destroying a six-story residential building in Jaramana on the outskirts of Damascus. Hezbollah and the state run Syrian Arab News Agency reported that the building was destroyed by an air-to-surface missile launched by the Israeli Air Force. ==Trial==

File:SamirKuntarEvidence.png|thumb|right|The pathologist's report, declassified in 2008, showed that 4-year-old Einat Haran's brain tissue was found on Kuntar's rifle. On 13 July 2008, after being classified for nearly thirty years, File No. 578/79, containing the evidence and testimony from Kuntar's 1980 trial, was first published. He explained that the group's goal had been to take hostages back to Lebanon, and that he had taken the 4-year-old to prevent Israeli police from shooting at them. According to some sources Samir Kuntar and Ahmed al-Abras were sentenced to 5 life terms and that two police officers were killed. ==Aftermath==

The killing of Einat Haran is regarded as one of the most brutal terror attacks in the history of Israel. A day after the attack, Abu Abbas, the PLF's leaders, announced from Beirut that the attack in Nahariya had been carried out "to protest the signing of the Egyptian–Israeli Peace Treaty" at Camp David the previous year. Ahmed AlAbras was freed by Israel in the Jibril Agreement of May 1985. According to Leonard A. Cole, Smadar Haran led a campaign in Israel to honor the victims of terrorism just as it does its fallen soldiers, and in 2003 she opposed the release of Samir Kuntar in exchange for the bodies of the 3 Israeli soldiers captured by Hezbollah during the 2000 Hezbollah cross-border raid, and for Elchanan Tannenbaum, the Israeli businessman and former IDF colonel who was kidnapped by Hezbollah in Dubai. Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said that "The murder of a family in Israel is unforgivable" and refused to release Kuntar in the 2003 swap. Samir Kuntar spent nearly three decades in prison before being released on 16 July 2008 as part of an Israel-Hezbollah prisoner swap. He denied killing Danny and Einat (the child and her father), while in Lebanon he was widely regarded as a national hero. He was killed on 19 December 2015, in a suspected Israeli airstrike, though Israel did not confirm this and the Free Syrian Army would later take credit for killing Kuntar. ==References==