Baqa al-Gharbiyye resident Houssain Houari was indicted by the Haifa court on Friday for a series of security related crimes, including informing an agent of a foreign power and producing and storing illegal weapons, Ynet reported on Friday.
A resident of Israel until his parents were divorced in 2012, Houari lived with his father in Nablus in the West Bank from 2012 until 2018. He returned to Israel to live with his mother in 2018.
Allegedly, Houari was recruited online by a Hamas agent and joined various Hamas related discussion groups in which, among other things, pictures of IDF special unit soldiers that were engaged in a Gaza operation in November were displayed.
Houari allegedly replied to the pictures saying that he might have seen before one of the soldiers from the pictures.
He was also allegedly indicted for learning how to create an explosive device from online videos, Yisrael Hayom reported. Last summer, IDF Operation “HeartBreaker” discovered a Hamas network posing as attractive young women and men on social networks in order to lure in IDF soldiers for acquiring access to information and intelligence on the army.An investigation by the IDF’s Military Intelligence found that the eleven suspects (three approached soldiers on WhatsApp and eight on Facebook) were part of Hamas' intelligence network. They asked soldiers to download applications that compromised their cell phones with Trojan malware.