Imad Amhaz was temporarily residing in the small coastal town of Batroun in northern Lebanon, near the maritime navigation training institute where he was enrolled, according to his family. friday 1Ahem In November, at dawn, when the night was still thick, according to video surveillance images, this thirty-year-old man was kidnapped by about twenty armed men. The latter did not take the trouble to be discreet: the neighbors heard them forcing the door of the accommodation. Speaking in Arabic, they introduced themselves as members of a Lebanese security service before leaving by sea.
Only the next day the official Lebanese press agency published fragments of this matter that is causing unrest in the country. In the context of the war, while the Israeli offensive launched on Lebanon on September 23 left more than 1,900 dead, suspicions of an operation led by the Jewish State, which seeks to destroy Hezbollah, did not wait long. On Saturday afternoon, an Israeli military official announced in a statement that an elite naval unit, Flotilla 13, had carried out a “special operation” in Batrun and “arrested” TO “high-ranking Hezbollah agent”, now under interrogation in Israel.
Hezbollah remains silent. On Saturday he contented himself with describing this strange kidnapping as“Zionist aggression”. The Lebanese authorities are also silent about this kidnapping, which is the subject of an investigation.
According to three judicial sources cited by the American news agency Associated Press, the investigation aims to determine whether Imad Amhaz was kidnapped because of his ties to Hezbollah or because he worked for an Israeli intelligence service and, in this case, would have been exfiltrated. . About ten SIM cards and at least two passports were found at his home. Most of the video surveillance cameras near the kidnapping site were reportedly disabled. The operation would have only lasted a few minutes. The investigation will also have to shed light on the signals recorded by military radars to understand which ship entered Lebanese waters. The presence of these radars was reinforced in the early 2020s to counter illegal departures of migrants from Lebanon to Cyprus.
Israel’s “freedom of movement” in Lebanon
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