Tel Aviv ‘arrests’ Palestinians recruited by militant Hezbollah

This news has been read 5067 times!

JERUSALEM, Aug 16, (Agencies): Israel’s Shin Bet security service announced Tuesday it has arrested a network of Palestinians allegedly recruited via Facebook by Lebanon’s militant Hezbollah movement to attack Israelis. “Along with the orders to carry out shooting attacks and suicide bombings against Israeli targets, the agents were ordered to help recruit more (Palestinians) for the organisation’s activities,” a Shin Bet statement read. In one case, a Hezbollah agent had used Facebook to recruit a resident of Qalqilya who in turn recruited four others from his city in the north of the occupied West Bank, it said. The five allegedly began gathering intelligence on Israeli army activities in the area and to conduct weapons training, before being arrested in June. Shin Bet also said a Gazan recruited by Hezbollah through Facebook recruited three Palestinians from the West Bank who had started to train and plan attacks. The four were also arrested before carrying out any action.

The nine Palestinians have been charged in a military court in the West Bank, the agency said, without giving a date. The Shin Bet said Hezbollah was also reaching out to Arab Israelis through Facebook in an attempt “to recruit them to carry out terror attacks”. “Hezbollah is determined to continue encouraging the recent terror events from a distance and in an attempt to not let its involvement be seen,” the Shin Bet said. A wave of deadly unrest has rocked Israel and the Palestinian territories since last October. The violence has killed 219 Palestinians, 34 Israelis, two Americans, an Eritrean and a Sudanese, according to an AFP tally. Most of the Palestinians killed were carrying out knife, gun or car-ramming attacks, Israeli authorities say. In January, Israel announced the arrest of a fivemember cell based in Tulkarem in the West Bank, recruited online by Jawad Nasrallah, son of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

Israel fought a devastating month-long war in 2006 against Hezbollah that killed more than 1,200 people in Lebanon, mostly civilians, and 160 Israelis, most of them soldiers. The powerful Shiite Muslim group has targeted Israeli army patrols along the border in southern Lebanon in response to strikes against its members, most recently on January 4. In July, Israel announced it had outlawed a Palestinian group it said acted as a front for Iran-funded militant actions against Israelis and the Palestinian Authority of president Mahmud Abbas. Meanwhile, twenty-five Palestinians were wounded in clashes with Israeli soldiers conducting searches in a refugee camp in the southern West Bank on Tuesday, Red Crescent medics said. Some of the wounded had been hit by live ammunition, others by rubber bullets, the medics said. The clashes erupted when a large convoy of Israeli military vehicles entered Al-Fawwar camp, near the flashpoint city of Hebron, witnesses said.

This news has been read 5067 times!