Arab lawyer sentenced to 7.5 years for collaborating with Hamas
Mohammad Abed was also fined NIS 50,000 after being convicted of passing messages unrelated with legal counsel between the Hamas terror organization and security prisoners; Judge: 'He harmed national security.
An Arab lawyer from Bi'ina in northern Israel, who was convicted in January for transferring messages between security prisoners in Israel and members of Hamas, was sentenced Thursday to seven and a half years in prison.
The lawyer, Mohammad Abed, also received to one year suspended sentence and a NIS 50,000 fine, and the state has confiscated more than NIS 1 million from his home and bank account.
Haifa District Court Judge Avraham Elyakim who ruled on Abed's sentence stated that the information passed by the lawyer was "a ticking time bomb," adding that Abed "stood in the center of a communication circle between Khaled Mashal in Qatar and Saleh al-Arouri in Turkey, who aimed, as leaders of Hamas, to severely harm the state of Israel.
"He had no qualms about being a communications link between those two schemers."
Abed, who usually represented security prisoners and detainees, worked in cooperation with a lawyer from Nablus, a member of Hamas, and in some of the cases with Mahmoud Ragheb, a lawyer from Gaza.
In addition, he maintained contact with Firas Fidi, a Hamas terrorist who carried out several terror attacks in Israel, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2002, released in the Shalit deal and exiled to Gaza.
Abed was sentenced for crimes he carried out during the year 2012-2014, which were outlined in his indictment in 2014, and included the passing of messages intended "to coordinate protests and solidarity between the leaders of Hamas and prisoners, to multiply hunger strikes and boycott courthouses with the target of expressing solidarity with specific prisoners."
The indictment went on to state that Abed intended to "create changes in various decisions by the Israel Prison Service that relate to prisoner's rights and the separations of prisoners."
Abed was convicted of meeting with several different prisoners on 18 different occasions, passing messages entirely unrelated to legal counsel from them to Hamas, and vice versa.
Turning to Abed after the sentencing, Judge Elyakim expressed his inability to understand what made the lawyer "undermine the security of his country, where his family, wife and children live." The judge noted that Abed carried out the crime for money, but never expressed any objection to Hamas' ideology.
"The defendant knew well that the information he passed on had the potential of being a ticking 'time bomb,'" said the judge's in his verdict. "Each of the 18 reports I analyzed for the verdict either harmed national security, or had the potential to do so."
(Translated & edited by Lior Mor)
