Israel accuses Israeli businessman of planning assassinations of high-ranking officials on Iranian orders
Israel has accused Israeli businessman Moti Maman of allegedly being recruited by the Islamic Republic of Iran to allegedly assassinate high-ranking Hebrew officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
According to the Israeli authorities, the list of targets for elimination would also include Israel's Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, the head of the Shabak, or Israeli intelligence service, Ronen Bar, and former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett.
The Israeli police and Shabak issued a joint statement saying that the Israeli citizen was recruited by Iran's intelligence services to ‘promote the assassination of Israeli figures’ as well as to recruit a person to act as a ‘double agent’ infiltrating the Mossad, one of Israel's intelligence agencies.
History of an investigation
The Israeli security and intelligence services jointly explained that last August a citizen was arrested for committing violations of state security by being in contact with members of the intelligence services of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
According to these sources, the investigation carried out by the Shabak and the Israeli army discovered that the citizen was a businessman who had been living in Turkey for a long time and who had business and social relations with people of Turkish and Iranian origin, as reported by media outlets such as Al Ain and Al Arab.
The suspect allegedly agreed in April 2024 to meet with a wealthy businessman living in Iran in order to do business. To this end, he arrived in the Turkish city of Samandag in Turkey, where he met with representatives of the Iranian businessman, maintaining telephone contacts with the latter, who was not allowed to leave Iran.
Subsequently, last May, the Israeli businessman arrived in the Islamic Republic to meet with the Iranian businessman.
According to the Israeli authorities, the businessman proposed to the Israeli citizen to carry out various security tasks inside Israel for the benefit of the Iranian regime, including the transfer of money or weapons at predetermined points, to photograph various locations in Israel and send them to the Iranian authorities, and to threaten Israeli citizens who had previously been recruited for Iran in order to force them to carry out orders.
It was also noted that the Israeli citizen under investigation requested that the matter be considered and that he infiltrated a second time overland into Iran in August 2024.
The relationship deepened further and the Israeli businessman ended up allegedly meeting with Iranian intelligence officials who allegedly asked him to carry out terrorist activities on behalf of Iran on Israeli soil, including the assassinations of Benjamin Netanyahu, Yoav Gallant or Ronen Bar.
The aim would be to hit Israel hard with a strong response to the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, leader of the Palestinian extremist movement Hamas (currently at war with Israel), carried out on Iranian territory on 31 July 2024.
According to information from Israeli security and intelligence services, the Israeli citizen had another meeting with Iranian intelligence officials, in which they repeated his proposal to assassinate senior officials, and discussed the possibility of him depositing money in specific locations in Israel for the benefit of others and recruiting a person for the Mossad to become a double agent.
Also during this meeting, the Israeli businessman reportedly requested an advance payment of one million dollars, but the Iranian agents rejected his request and informed him that they would contact him in the future. Before leaving Iran, the suspect reportedly received 5,000 euros from the businessman he had contacted and from the Iranian intelligence representative in exchange for his participation in the meetings, according to Israeli security and intelligence forces.
Finally, after all this information and the investigation process, Moti Maman was charged in court on 19 September, although the authorities did not disclose the circumstances of his arrest.
According to the court file, Moti Maman is from Ashkelon and was born in 1952, without providing further details, and has been detained since 29 August until the indictment was handed down.
A senior official consulted by Al Ain media indicated that this affair was ‘extremely dangerous’, calling it ‘an example of the great efforts made by Iranian intelligence agencies to recruit Israeli citizens in order to promote terrorist activities in Israel’.
Fierce confrontation
This is not the only action planned in recent times in an attempt to carry out the assassination of Israeli personalities. Last week, the Shabak announced that it had foiled a plot by the Lebanese extremist group Hezbollah to assassinate a former senior defence official, in this case former defence minister Moshe Yaalon.
The announcement of the arrest came after Hezbollah was subjected to unprecedented attacks on two consecutive days in which communications devices were remotely detonated, killing at least 32 people and injuring hundreds more.
Israel bombed southern Lebanon on Thursday, a day after the explosions of these devices belonging to the Lebanese Hezbollah group, potentially sending the two enemies hurtling towards war.
Sophisticated attacks on communications equipment used by the Iranian-backed Hezbollah group, which is currently embroiled in a bitter standoff with Israel stemming from the Gaza war, have caused chaos in Lebanon and could lead to an all-out war like the one Israel and the armed group last fought 18 years ago.
All this against a backdrop of high tension in the Middle East. A situation aggravated by the bloody Gaza war between the Israeli army and the Palestinian armed group Hamas, which was triggered by the Israeli military incursion into the Gaza Strip, launched in response to the terrible Hamas attacks on Israeli territory on 7 October 2023 that left around 1,200 people dead and some 250 kidnapped.
