Lebanon remains technically at war with Israel and any contact is punishable with imprisonment.
Lebanon has arrested 32 people in recent months on suspicion of providing Israel with information on Hezbollah that facilitated strikes on the Iran-backed militant group, a judicial official told AFP on Thursday.
More than a year of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah including two months of open war saw Israel pummel the group’s arsenal and kill a slew of senior commanders, and it has kept up strikes since a November truce.
Requesting anonymity, the official said that “at least 32 people have been arrested on suspicion of collaborating with Israel, six of them before the ceasefire”.
So far, “nine people have been tried by the military court”, while 23 are still under investigation, the official added.
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Contact with Israel punishable
Lebanon remains technically at war with Israel and any contact is punishable with imprisonment.
In September last year, hundreds of Hezbollah pagers and walkie-talkies exploded in an Israeli operation that paralysed the group’s communications systems and that Lebanon said killed 39 people and wounded thousands.
The following week, Israel killed longtime chief Hassan Nasrallah in a massive air strike on Beirut’s southern suburbs.
Two sentenced
A second judicial official with knowledge of the investigations said two of those convicted were sentenced to eight and seven years of hard labour respectively.
They were found guilty of “providing the enemy with coordinates, addresses and names of Hezbollah officials, knowing that the enemy would use this information to bomb locations where the group’s officials and leaders were located”, that official said.
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