BEIRUT —
Lebanon said Monday it had busted
at least 17 suspected Israeli spy networks in one of the largest nationwide
crackdowns in recent years, with a judicial source reporting 21 arrests.
اضافة اعلان
Interior Minister
Bassam Mawlawi told the Cabinet
that security forces had “clamped down on 17 spy networks working for Israel”,
acting information minister Abbas Halabi said after the meeting.
Neighboring Lebanon and Israel remain in an official
state of war.
Halabi said the rings operated both “locally and
regionally”, without elaborating or confirming how many people had been
arrested.
The arrests were part of an operation carried out by
Lebanon’s
Internal Security Forces (ISF).
Prime Minister
Najib Mikati said the arrests had
helped stop “efforts to tamper with security and sabotage the stability of the
country,” according to a cabinet statement read by Halabi.
Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri praised the operation
as “unique achievement.”
Al-Akhbar, a newspaper supportive of Lebanon’s
powerful Hezbollah movement, reported the busts on Monday, calling it the
largest operation against suspected Israeli agents in the country for 13 years.
It said that the ISF’s intelligence unit started the
crackdown four weeks ago and that the detained include Lebanese, Palestinian,
and Syrian nationals — some of whom were later released.
A prominent judicial source told AFP that 21 people
had been arrested, with their cases referred to military courts.
Their main tasks were to “collect data on
Hezbollah’s military and security sites” in the group’s strongholds in south
Lebanon, the southern suburbs of the capital Beirut and the Bekaa valley, the
judicial source said.
The alleged spies also gathered information about
other party leaders and political figures, the source said, adding that one of
the suspects is a Hezbollah member that the group has “refused to hand over to
the Lebanese judiciary”.
The source said that the alleged spies’ handlers had
exploited their “difficult living and social conditions, which made it easier
to recruit them for these missions.”
Lebanon is mired in a deep economic crisis, and
around 80 percent of Lebanese live in poverty, amid rampant inflation and
extended power cuts.
The Al-Akhbar report claimed that at least 12 of the
suspects in detention were aware they working for Israel, while the rest
believed they were providing information for global companies or NGOs.
Israel launched a 33-day invasion of Lebanon in
2006.
Between April 2009 and 2014, Lebanese authorities
detained more than 100 people accused of spying for Israel, most of them
members of the military or telecom employees. The rate of arrests, however, had
declined in recent years
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