The IDF arrested on Monday a Palestinian Authority Arab from a family affiliated with Hamas after he was spotted taking pictures of a Jewish community located between Hevron and Arad, the Jewish Press has learned.

Sources said that the Arab is part of a clan that lives next door to the community of Beit Yatir, located at the southern edge of the Hevron Hills, and is often supported by leftists and anarchists.

He entered the community from the adjacent Yatir Forest, which is not fenced, and began taking pictures until a resident saw him and reported the suspicious activity.

The Israeli Embassy in Kathmandu, Nepal recently arrested an Iranian national and turned him over to local authorities on suspicion of spying. He had hidden his Iranian passport and possessed a fake Israeli passport, according the Himalayan Times reported Monday,

The suspect was identified as Mohsin Khosravian, who was arrested Saturday a week ago.

Officials at the Embassy said he “carried a tourist map of the Lazimpat area,” where the Israeli mission is located, an indication he might have been preparing to attack Israeli tourists.

Khosravian made “frequent and suspicious visits” to the Israeli Embassy area, but he told police after his arrest that he had left his hotel room to look for a place to repair his laptop.

He also claimed he traveled to Nepal on his way to Europe to seek asylum because he faces losses in his garment business.

Officials caught up with him when his wife, who is from Thailand, and two of his relatives from Iran arrived in Kathmandu from Bangkok to meet with him.

The Nepalese newspaper reported that the suspected spy entered Malaysia on his Iranian passport last month and then obtained a fake Israeli passport, under the name “Alexander,” in Kuala Lumpur. He allegedly used it receive an “on arrival” visa when he landed at the Nepalese airport on April 3.

The Nepal Police’s Central Bureau of Investigation and Special Bureau have launched investigation into his activities and possible terrorist links.

Last year, Turkish police said they busted an Iranian spy ring, and Indian police deported an Iranian national who was caught spying on a Chabad House, a synagogue and other places where Jews gather.

Egyptian authorities have smashed a suspected Israeli spy ring consisting of Egyptian and Palestinian Authority Arabs operating in the Sinai Peninsula, official state media reported Sunday.

The only alleged spy who has been arrested is an Egyptian national who is said to have been the ringleader and who confessed that he handed over secret military information to the Mossad.

State media said authorities are trying to track down the other members of the alleged ring.

The IDF soon will install protective systems onboard its smartphones used by the IDF to protect them against digital Trojan horses and prevent various spyware software using the devices eavesdropping, Israel Defense reported.

The military’s Information Security department has determined there has been a significant rise in risks to the sensitive data found on cell phones of IDF officers who have yet to receive considerable protection.

Viruses take over the cell phones, via SMS messages, and allow hostile entities to know its location, view the contents of the device and even remotely operate its camera.

“Prisoner X,” who hanged himself in an Israeli jail in 2010, was an Australian citizen who worked for the Mossad but apparently committed a heinous crime, perhaps treason, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) reported Tuesday.

The report sent the Netanyahu government scrambling to convene an urgent meeting of Israeli editors to keep the allegations from appearing in Israeli media, Haaretz reported.

ABC named “Prisoner X” as Ben Zygier, who went by the alias of Ben Alon or Ben Allen after he moved to Israel. Zygier, or Alon or Allen, was married to an Israeli woman and had two children. He was mysteriously jailed in a super-high security wing approximately 10 years after moving to Israel.

His identity never was revealed even to prison guards, and the prisoner committed suicide at the age of 34 despite state-of-the-art surveillance systems that are installed to prevent prisoners from taking their own lives. Zygier was in the Ayalon prison wing that held Yigal Amir, who assassinated Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin.

Israel never admitted to the existence of Prisoner X even after the suicide was reported in 2010. At the time, media speculated the prisoner was a most senior enemy agent, with some suggesting that he was a senior Iranian Revolutionary Guards general.

After ABC’s report Tuesday, Haaretz told its readers that the Office of the Prime Minister called an emergency meeting of local editors “to ask its members to co-operate with the government and withhold publication of information pertaining to an incident that is very embarrassing to a certain government agency.”

ABC said it was able to identify Prisoner X through circumstantial evidence that was provided after the suicide victim’s body was sent to Melbourne a week after his death. Before then, Australia did not of his incarceration.

Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr responded to the ABC’s exposé, “Those allegations certainly do trouble me.

“It’s never been raised with me…. The difficulty is I’m advised we’ve had no contact with his family [and] there’s been no request for consular assistance during the period it’s alleged he was in prison.

“Even if Prisoner X has now been identified, his crime, however, remains a mystery although it has been widely speculated that it would have involved treachery to warrant such extreme measures.”

If the allegations are true, Israel might be subject to serious questions about due process of law.  Human Rights Watch researcher Bill van Esveld told the newspaper that there are serious issues involved concerning fundamental prisoners’ rights.

“It’s called a disappearance, and a disappearance is not only a violation of that person’s due process rights – that’s a crime,” he said. “Under international law, the people responsible for that kind of treatment actually need to be criminally prosecuted themselves.”

I previously wrote about new documents declassified in the Jonathan Pollard case, which might help us understand his disproportionate life sentence and why he is still imprisoned after 27 years.

When Naval Investigative Service analyst Jonathan Pollard spied for Israel in 1984 and 1985, his Israeli handlers asked primarily for nuclear, military and technical information on the Arab states, Pakistan, and the Soviet Union – not on the United States – according to the newly-declassified CIA 1987 damage assessment of the Pollard case, published Friday by the National Security Archive at George Washington University.

According to the GWU National Security Archive, the damage assessment (PDF) includes new details on the specific subjects and documents sought by Pollard’s Israeli handlers, such as Syrian drones and central communications, Egyptian missile programs, and Soviet air defenses. The Israelis specifically asked for a signals intelligence manual that they needed to listen in on Soviet advisers in Syria. The document describes how Pollard’s handler, Joseph Yagur, told him to ignore a request, from Yagur’s boss, for U.S. “dirt” on senior Israeli officials and told Pollard that gathering such information would terminate the operation.

Under the heading “What the Israelis Did Not Ask For,” the assessment remarks that they “never expressed interest in US military activities, plans, capabilities, or equipment.”

Jonathan Pollard’s I.D. Photograph.                                                       Photo: U.S. Naval intelligence

The assessment also notes that Pollard volunteered delivery of three daily intelligence summaries that had not been requested by his handlers, but which proved useful to them, and ultimately handed over roughly 1,500 such messages from the Middle East and North Africa Summary (MENAS), the Mediterranean Littoral Intelligence Summary (MELOS), and the Indian Ocean Littoral Intelligence Summary, in addition to the more than 800 compromised documents on other subjects that Pollard delivered to the Israelis in suitcases.

The damage assessment (PDF) also features a detailed 21-page chronology of Pollard’s personal life and professional career, including his work for the Israelis, highlighting more than a dozen examples of unusual behavior by Pollard that the CIA suggests should have, in retrospect, alerted his supervisors that he was a security risk. Prominent on the list were false statements by Pollard during a 1980 assignment with Task Force 168, the naval intelligence element responsible for HUMINT collection. Pollard is now serving a life sentence in prison for espionage.

The CIA denied release of most of the Pollard damage assessment in 2006, claiming for example that pages 18 through 165 were classified in their entirety and not a line of those pages could be released. The Archive appealed the CIA’s decision to the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel, established by President Clinton in 1995 and continued by Presidents Bush and Obama. The ISCAP showed its value yet again as a check on systemic overclassification by ordering release of scores of pages from the Pollard damage assessment that were previously withheld by CIA, and published today for the first time.

According to Jeffrey T. Richelson, writing for the GWU Archive, until his arrest, Pollard delivered approximately 800 documents, many of which were classified top secret or codeword. In addition, he stole an estimated 1,500 current intelligence summary messages.

The documents provided information on PLO headquarters in Tunisia; specific capabilities of Tunisian and Libyan air defense systems; Iraqi and Syrian chemical warfare productions capabilities (including detailed satellite imagery); Soviet arms shipments to Syria and other Arab states; naval forces, port facilities, and lines of communication of various Middle Eastern and North African countries; the MiG-29 fighter; and Pakistan’s nuclear program. Also included was a U.S. assessment of Israeli military capabilities.

Pollard’s disclosures were alarming to U.S. officials for several reasons, some of which were noted in their official declarations (Document 6, Document 8). One, despite the fact that both the U.S. and Israeli considered each other legitimate intelligence targets, was Israel’s willingness to run a human penetration operation directed at the U.S. government. Another, was the damage to the intelligence sharing arrangement with Israel – since its acquisition of material from Pollard weakened the U.S. position vis-a-vis intelligence exchanges with Israel.

In addition, there was no guarantee that such documents, revealing both sources and methods as well as assessments, would not find their way to the Soviet Union via a Soviet penetration of the Israeli intelligence or defense community – as had happened with a number of other allies. Further, since Israel was a target of U.S. intelligence collection – particularly technical collection – operations, the documents could be used by Israeli counterintelligence and security organizations to help Israel neutralize or degrade U.S. collection operations.