Arab Israeli held for trying to join Syrian jihadists

Yousef Nasrallah, 21, was held and tortured in Damascus, is said to have passed on sensitive information to Assad regime

An Arab Israeli man was indicted on Monday on charges that he traveled to Syria, tried to join the ranks of a jihadist group, and conveyed sensitive information about Israel to the Syrian government.

Yousef Nasrallah, 21, is accused of leaving to Syria via Jordan in April 2014 with the intention of teaming up with either the al-Nusra Front or the Islamic State.

Shortly after he reached Damascus, however, he was detained by the Syrian government, imprisoned for several months and tortured. Damascus reached a deal with the Palestinian embassy, and he was then deported to Jordan. He was arrested by police and the Shin Bet upon his arrival back in Israel from Jordan.

According to the indictment, Nasrallah, a resident of Qalansawe in central Israel, was asked by his Syrian interrogators to provide information on where wounded rebel forces were being hospitalized in Israel, according to the Ynet news website. He was also probed regarding an army base on the coastal highway, and told them what he knew about its location. His Syrian captors also pressed him for information on border control in the West Bank, and asked him if he had any Jewish friends or relatives who served in the IDF.

Nasrallah confessed to the charges of going to Syria and offering information while under duress, the report said.

Despite the confession, his father insisted Nasrallah had accidentally entered Syria. “My son entered Syria by accident and was arrested there,” he told Ynet. “He had no ulterior motives. He reached a certain area and didn’t know how to get back and therefore was forced to continue toward Syria.”

The Shin Bet and police believe that more than 30 Israeli Arabs have joined the Islamic State. In late November, Hamza Magamzeh, 22, was indicted for fighting with the jihadis.

In October, the family of Othman Abdelkayan, from the Bedouin Negev town of Hura, said he was killed in fighting in Syria. Abdelkayan, an Israeli doctor, left the country in May to join IS in Syria. He was slated to do a residency program at Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba in May.

The Shin Bet has barred several individuals, many of whom are students in their late teens and early twenties, from trying to leave the country for Syria and advocated for severe prison sentences for those who are caught upon return. “The departure of Arabs from Israel for Syria, and their stay there alongside global jihad elements, constitutes a series of threats,” the Shin Bet wrote in a report.

Foremost among those threats, the security organization said, was the possibility that the terror groups in Syria would use the Israeli volunteers to “learn the Israeli arena” in order to carry out terror attacks there. “The threat potential, from that perspective, is only intensified by the fact of the shared border between Israel and Syria and the possibility of acting against it [Israel] in the area.”

Stuart Winer and Mitch Ginsburg contributed to this report.