Lawyer jailed for 7.5 years for serving as Hamas agent
Muhammed Abad, convicted of relaying info between terror group's leadership and security prisoners, to appeal sentence
An Israeli court on Thursday sentenced a lawyer to seven and a half years in prison for helping to relay information between Hamas prisoners in Israeli jails and the terror group’s leaders in the Gaza Strip.
Muhammad Abed, whose clients included security prisoners, was in contact with Firas Fidi, a Hamas activist who was convicted of carrying out terror attacks in Israel, sentenced to life imprisonment, and then released to Gaza as part of the 2011 prisoner swap for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.
He was also convicted of being in touch with five “foreign agents,” with the aim of helping Hamas and harming state security.
In addition to the prison term, the Haifa District Court gave Abed a choice between one year’s suspended sentence, a NIS 50,000 ($13,700) fine to be paid by May 1, 2018, and an additional five months behind bars.
Responding to the sentence, Abed told Channel 2 news that he’d been done an injustice and would appeal to the Supreme Court.
Abed’s lawyer, Ahmad Yunis, said the charges were “absurd” and noted that former Joint (Arab) List lawymaker Basel Ghattas was given only two years in prison as part of a plea bargain for the worse crime of smuggling cellphones to inmates.