BEIRUT: Lebanon said Monday it had busted at least 17 suspected Israeli spy networks, in one of the largest nationwide crackdowns in recent years.
Interior minister Bassam Mawlawi informed cabinet that security forces had “clamped down on 17 spy networks working for Israel,” acting information minister Abbas Halabi said after the meeting.
Neighbouring Lebanon and Israel remain in an official state of war.
Halabi said the rings operated both “locally and regionally,” without elaborating.
He also did not specify how many people were arrested as part of the operation, which was carried out by the country’s Internal Security Forces (ISF).
Prime Minister Najib Mikati said the arrests had helped stop “efforts to tamper with security and sabotage the stability of the country,” according to a cabinet statement read by Halabi.
Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri praised the operation as “unique achievement.”
Al-Akhbar, a newspaper supportive of Lebanon’s powerful Hezbollah movement, reported the busts on Monday, calling it the largest operation against suspected Israeli agents in the country for 13 years.
It said that the ISF’s intelligence unit started the crackdown four weeks ago and had so far detained around 20 people, including Lebanese, Palestinian and Syrian nationals — some of whom were later released.
The Al-Akhbar report claimed that at least 12 of the suspects in detention were aware they working for Israel, while the rest believed they were providing information for global companies or non profit organizations.
Israel and the Shiite movement Hezbollah fought a 33-day war in Lebanon in 2006.
Between April 2009 and 2014, Lebanese authorities detained more than 100 people accused of spying for Israel, most of them members of the military or telecom employees. The rate of arrests, however, had declined in recent years.
Lebanon busts suspected Israeli ‘spy networks’
https://arab.news/y2xj6
Lebanon busts suspected Israeli ‘spy networks’
- Mikati said arrests had helped stop “efforts to tamper with security and sabotage the stability of the country”
- Al-Akhbar: ISF’s intelligence unit started crackdown four weeks ago and had so far detained around 20 people
Algeria parliament to vote on law declaring French colonization ‘state crime’
- The vote comes as the two countries are embroiled in a major diplomatic crisis
ALGERIA: Algeria’s parliament is set to vote on Wednesday on a law declaring France’s colonization of the country a “state crime,” and demanding an apology and reparations.
The vote comes as the two countries are embroiled in a major diplomatic crisis, and analysts say that while Algeria’s move is largely symbolic, it could still be politically significant.
The bill states that France holds “legal responsibility for its colonial past in Algeria and the tragedies it caused,” according to a draft seen by AFP.
The proposed law “is a sovereign act,” parliament speaker Brahim Boughali was quoted by the APS state news agency as saying.
It represents “a clear message, both internally and externally, that Algeria’s national memory is neither erasable nor negotiable,” he added.
France’s colonization of Algeria from 1830 until 1962 remains a sore spot in relations between the two countries.
French rule over Algeria was marked by mass killings and large-scale deportations, all the way to the bloody war of independence from 1954-1962.
Algeria says the war killed 1.5 million people, while French historians put the death toll lower at 500,000 in total, 400,000 of them Algerian.
French President Emmanuel Macron has previously acknowledged the colonization of Algeria as a “crime against humanity,” but has stopped short of offering an apology.
Asked last week about the vote, French foreign ministry spokesman Pascal Confavreux said he would not comment on “political debates taking place in foreign countries.”
Hosni Kitouni, a researcher in colonial history at the University of Exeter in the UK, said that “legally, this law has no international scope and therefore is not binding for France.”
But “its political and symbolic significance is important: it marks a rupture in the relationship with France in terms of memory,” he said.
