Neo-Nazi pleads guilty to trying to give Hezbollah intel on Israeli officials in US

A man in the United States linked to white supremacist movements pleaded guilty Monday to attempting to give Hezbollah information on Israeli officials.

The charge stems from efforts to provide the Iran-backed terrorist group with “a list of personally identifiable information for individuals purportedly affiliated with the government of Israel,” according to criminal information filed in February.

Regan Prater also pleaded guilty to setting a fire that destroyed an office at a historic social justice center in Tennessee, a court document shows.

Sentencing is scheduled for September 9 in Knoxville, Tennessee.

A public defender representing Prater did not immediately respond to an email and phone message requesting comment.

Prater was arrested last April in connection with the arson at the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market. The arrest came six years after the March 2019 blaze, which caused more than $1.2 million in damage, prosecutors say.

An affidavit filed in federal court in East Tennessee last year said Prater’s posts in several group chats affiliated with white supremacist organizations connected him to the crime. In one private message, a witness who sent screenshots to the FBI asked a person authorities believe was Prater whether he set the fire.

“I’m not admitting anything,” the person using the screen name “Rooster” wrote. But he later went on to describe exactly how the fire was set with “a sparkler bomb and some Napalm.”

A white-power symbol was spray-painted on the pavement near the site of the fire. The affidavit describes it as a “triple cross” and says it was also found on one of the firearms used by a shooter who killed 51 people at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, on March 15, 2019, about two weeks before the Highlander fire.

Prater was initially charged in 2025 with one count of arson.

On Monday, the previous indictment was dismissed in favor of the criminal information filed in February, which included the charge related to the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah. In a plea agreement filed the following day in February, the government agreed that a sentence of no more than 20 years was appropriate.

Prater was previously sentenced to five years in federal prison for setting a fire in June 2019 at an adult video and novelty store in East Tennessee. He pleaded guilty and was ordered to pay $106,000 in restitution in that case. At the scene of that fire, investigators found a cellphone they later determined belonged to Prater. The phone included a short video showing a person inside the store lighting an accelerant, according to the affidavit.

Highlander is known as a place where civil rights figures, including Rosa Parks and John Lewis, received training. Parks attended a workshop there on integration in 1955, about six months before she famously refused to move to the back of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. She always credited Highlander with helping her become a more determined activist.

The blaze at Highlander broke out in the early morning of March 29, 2019. No one was injured, but decades’ worth of irreplaceable documents were lost. They included artifacts, speeches, and other materials from different eras, including from the Civil Rights Movement.

A report published Monday by Tel Aviv University said that 2025 saw an alarming surge in violent attacks against Jews in a year when more Diaspora Jews were murdered in antisemitic incidents than in any other year in the previous three decades.

While total counts of antisemitic activity, including vandalism, verbal threats, and harassment, fell in many countries during 2025 compared to 2024, violent incidents, such as beatings or stone-throwing, became more commonplace, according to the annual report on antisemitism in the world published by TAU’s Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry and the Irwin Cotler Institute for Democracy, Human Rights and Justice.

In every Western country, the total number of antisemitic incidents remained dozens of percentage points higher than in 2022, the year preceding the October 7, 2023, massacre that sparked the war in Gaza, the report noted.

The worst attacks of 2025 in the US included the May 21 killing of two Israeli Embassy staff members, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, DC, and the killing of Karen Diamond on June 1 in Boulder, Colorado, after a man shouting “Free Palestine” threw incendiary devices at participants in a pro-Israel march.