Makram Rabah briefly detained over anti-Hezbollah interview

Lebanon’s General Security directorate on Monday briefly detained outspoken political activist Makram Rabah following interrogation over an interview in which he attacked Hezbollah and talked about alleged Hezbollah arms storage and manufacturing sites.

Media reports said Rabah was held after he refused to hand over his cellphone.

Rabah’s friends and a number of activists had called for a solidarity sit-in outside the General Security HQ in Beirut.

“Military Court investigative judge Fadi Akiki is the one who issued the order to detain me,” Rabah told Al-Arabiya’s Al-Hadath TV following his release.

“What happened today proves that the Military Court is a tool to pressure the activists who are opposed to Hezbollah,” he added.

“If I were a captagon dealer like Hezbollah, investigative judge Fadi Akiki would not have dared to detain me,” Rabah charged, stressing that the Lebanese constitution preserves his right to express his opinion.

“The collaborator is the one who leaves at large those who killed Lokman Slim in south Lebanon,” Rabah, who was one of Slim’s close friends, added.

In a recent YouTube interview, Rabah alleged that Syria’s Qalamoun region near Lebanon’s border has become an area in which Hezbollah “manufactures” and “stores” its rockets.

“There are factories that can be found through GPS … If you use Google you can find them,” he told his interviewer.

In a post on his Instagram page, Rabah had announced that he had been summoned for interrogation by General Security's national security department.

Kataeb Party chief Sami Gemayel had called for Rabah's "immediate release."

"The same as we confronted and toppled the security-judicial apparatus in the near past, we will not allow a return to the fabrication of cases and the crackdown on freedom of expression under any excuse," Gemayel said in a post on the X platform.

Change bloc MPs Paula Yacoubian, Najat Saliba, Firas Hamdan, Melhem Khalaf, Ibrahim Mneimneh and Yassine Yassine had also expressed solidarity with Rabah and published a unified message on their X platform accounts.

"Freedom of opinion and expression is a right that is enshrined in the constitution and security summonings over a stance or an opinion are a return to obsolete practices. That's why we condemn the summoning of the academic Makram Rabah that is aimed at intimidation and the stifling of freedoms," the message said.