Jerusalem resident charged with aiding Hezbollah terror group

Prosecutors filed an indictment in Jerusalem’s District Court on Friday against a resident of the city, accusing him of aiding the Hezbollah terror group.

Ahmad Zahra, 32, is charged with contact with a foreign agent and providing information to the enemy in order to harm state security.

Prosecutors say Zahra contacted a man in Lebanon nine years ago and told him he wanted to make contact with Hezbollah in order to work for it inside Israel. They say he was given encrypting software by the organization for the purpose of exchanging messages.

Throughout the years Zahra was in contact with his handlers on various occasions, they said. He was given various tasks, including providing the terror group information on the goings-on in the capital, and Palestinian unrest there.

Zahra is also accused of photographing satellite dishes he believed were a strategic site and sending the pictures to Hezbollah.

Prosecutors said that at a certain point contacts stopped for several years, but were renewed this past year. During his honeymoon in Turkey, they said, Zahra received funds and a cellphone with encryption technology to allow him to once again contact handlers, which he did upon his return to Israel.

Zahra was arrested before he could carry out further missions.

Earlier this month an Arab Israeli woman was convicted of spying for Hezbollah and was sentenced to 2.5 years in jail after photographing various strategic sites for the group, including Iron Dome batteries and military bases.

Mai-Bat Masarwa was found to have sent photos to a Hezbollah agent who contacted her online, including pictures of bases, guard posts, military vehicles and more. Masarwa has confessed to the actions, but claimed she believed she was in touch with a Lebanese reporter, not a Hezbollah man.

And in July another woman, Yasmin Jaber, a resident of the Old City of Jerusalem, was sentenced to 2.5 years in prison for working to recruit Israelis and Palestinians to carry out terror attacks on behalf of the terror group.

Jaber, who worked at the time for the National Library of Israel on the campus of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, was arrested last August after an extensive Shin Bet security service investigation.

She was convicted under a plea bargain of contacting an enemy agent, being a member of a terrorist organization illegally traveling abroad, and possessing an article for the purpose of terror.