The Nazareth District Court Thursday sentenced a 30-year-old man from the Jezreel Valley community of Mazareb to six years imprisonment for passing information on to Hezbollah during the Second Lebanon War and conspiring to import narcotics.

Raid Mazareb, 30, of Mazareb in the Jezreel Valley made contact with a tracker in the Israel Defense Forces in search of information on ways to smuggle drugs from Lebanon to Israel. The tracker supplied Mazareb with the telephone number of a Lebanese drug dealer and agreed-upon contact codes.

Mazareb contacted the Lebanese drug dealer, engaging in numerous discussions with him, during which they planned the details of several drug details they intended to carry out. Using a third party, Mazareb sent the Lebanese dealer a SIM card purchased in Israel, allowing easier contact between the two despite the fact that Israel and Lebanon's networks are largely incompatible.

	Advertisement

In the early days of the Second Lebanon War which began July 12, from July 15 until his arrest on July 21, Mazareb spoke with the Lebanese dealer several times. At the dealer's request, he described the situation in Israel giving him information on the positions in Israel where Katyusha rockets fired by Hezbollah from north Lebanon had landed.

He also provided information on details published by the Israeli press regarding the IDF's movements and its plans to launch a ground offensive in north Lebanon.

On another occasion, shortly after the IAF struck the Al Dahiyya neighborhood of Beirut, the Lebanese dealer asked Mazareb about the function of the zeppelin over the area. Mazareb replied that its purpose was to photograph the region to enable the IAF to carry out further strikes on Hezbollah targets.

The court ruled that Mazareb provided this information in the knowledge that the man was acting under Hezbollah's instruction.

Mazareb's defense attorney stressed that the information Mazareb provided the Lebanese agent was 'of little intelligence value', and also emphasized that Mazareb's father had served in combat for an extended period in the IDF, and had suffered wounds that left him disabled as a result of his service.

The panel of judges, headed by Justice Menachem Ben David, took this into account, but held that "it is not the citizen's place to decide which information is useful to the enemy and which is not."

In their sentence, the judges noted that "it is well known that such contacts grow stronger over the years," and that "often, the citizen leaking the information is ensnared in the foreign agent's net and forced to continue the contact."

The judges also said that they had taken into consideration the fact the defendant had confessed, as well as the fact his father and many of his family members had served in the IDF and contributed to the Israel's security.