Wednesday, 7 January 2009
A 29-year-old Israeli Arab convicted of giving information to Hizbullah was sentenced Wednesday to four years in jail by a Petah Tikva court.
Khaled Kashkush was arrested in July upon landing at Ben-Gurion International Airport after returning to Israel for a visit from Germany where he had been studying for the last few years.
He was subsequently convicted of contact with a foreign agent and passing information to the enemy.
According to the indictment, Kashkush, a resident of the Israeli town of Kalansuwa, met with Hizbullah operatives starting in 2002, and was paid 13,000 euros for his services
The information that the Israeli Arab passed on to Hizbullah did not pose any harm to State security, Israeli security officials have said.
The charge sheet relates that the Arab Israeli, who was studying medicine in the town of Goettingen was originally approached by a doctor who heads a German-Lebanese charity that the indictment states funneled money to Hizbullah.
The doctor, Hisham Hassan, later introduced him to a Hizbullah handler, who was named in the indictment as Mohammed Hashem.
According to the indictment, Kashkush gave the Hizbullah man names of other Israeli Arabs studying abroad who could potentially be recruited, as well as information about the layout of his hometown and about an internship he did at an Israeli hospital.
The court also fined Kashkush NIS 70,000.
Israeli intelligence believes that Hizbullah has an entire branch that deals with drafting spies among Arab Israelis.
Last year, an IDF colonel was convicted of espionage for passing information to the terror group in order to facilitate the smuggling of illicit drugs from Lebanon into Israel.
The year before, a veteran Israeli Arab lawmaker fled the country rather than face charges of having ties to Hizbullah.
