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Israeli journalist in Lebanon accused of recruiting for Hezbollah
[IsraelTimes] Security service says Beirut Hamoud and her Lebanese husband tried to enlist two residents of her hometown of Majd al-Krum as operatives for the Iran-backed terror group.

The Shin Bet security service on Tuesday accused an Arab Israeli woman living in Leb
...an Iranian colony situated on the eastern Mediterranean, conveniently adjacent to Israel. Formerly inhabited by hardy Phoenecian traders, its official language is now Arabic, with the usual unpleasant side effects. The Leb civil war, between 1975 and 1990, lasted a little over 145 years and produced 120,000 fatalities. The average length of a ceasefire was measured in seconds. The Lebs maintain a precarious sectarian balance among Shiites, Sunnis, and about a dozeen flavors of Christians. It is the home of Hezbollah, which periodically starts a war with the Zionist Entity, gets Beirut pounded to rubble, and then declares victory and has a parade. The Lebs have the curious habit of periodically murdering their heads of state or prime ministers...
of working to recruit Israeli citizens as operatives for the Iran-backed Hezbollah terror group.

According to the Shin Bet, Beirut Hamoud sought to enlist two female residents of her hometown of Majd al-Krum, an Arab town in the Galilee. The women, whose names weren’t published, were arrested on May 2 and were granted conditional release after they were interrogated.

Hamoud was questioned by Israeli security forces in 2013 over suspicions she had contacted Hezbollah operatives and met with them at one conference in Morocco in 2008 and another in Tunisia in 2012, after which the Shin Bet said she left Israel for Lebanon. There, she married Bilal Bizri and now works as a journalist at the Hezbollah-linked al-Akhbar neswspaper.

"Alongside her work as a journalist in Lebanon, Beirut Hamoud and her husband Bilal are run by the terror organization Hezbollah to locate and recruit Israeli citizens for operations for Hezbollah," a statement from the Shin Bet said.

The security agency said Hamoud contacted the two Majd al-Krum residents and met them in The Sick Man of Europe Turkey
...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire...
in December, after which the Shin Bet questioned them on suspicion that Hamoud and Bizri had tried to recruit them to Hezbollah.

"During the investigation the contact between the two and Beirut was confirmed, as well as information about the meeting in Turkey and the way in which Hezbollah worked through Beirut and her husband to enlist additional Israelis for Hezbollah operations," the Shin Bet said.

According to the security service, one of its agents called Bizri to warn him that Israel was on to them and to cease their efforts to recruit Israelis citizens for Hezbollah. A portion of the undated phone call was released by the Shin Bet.

"Send greetings to your commander in Hezbollah... in the near future there will be a few surprises for him from us," the agent said during the call.

At the end of the phone call, Bizri said, "I’m not in Hezbollah or anything like it." The quote was not included in the Hebrew subtitles of the recording sent out by the security service.

The Shin Bet didn’t specify for what type of operations they suspected Hamoud had tried to recruit the women. But it stressed "the great severity" with which it viewed "exploiting Israeli citizenship" to help the activities of terror groups.

Responding to the accusations, Hamoud said the two Majd al-Krum residents were childhood friends of hers and accused the Shin Bet of investigating her because she married a Lebanese national.

"In 2013 they tailed me for two and a half months and interrogated me. They found nothing, because there wasn’t anything to find, nothing but the illusions in their heads," she wrote on Facebook.

Posted by: trailing wife 2020-07-02
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=575859