Lebanon failed to contact famous Lebanese journalist Maria Maalouf before sentencing her to 15 years in absentia last week for comments made five years ago, the US-based Christian-Maronite writer told The Jerusalem Post late on Monday night.
Maalouf was sentenced for speaking to Kan News in 2021, where she complained, “Hassan Nasrallah and Iran’s party in Lebanon have taken the state hostage and returned it to the stone age.
The recent crisis with Saudi Arabia demonstrates that Hezbollah has alienated Lebanon from its Arab surroundings… I’ve told Nasrallah that he is a murderer, that he has killed the children of Yemen, Syria, and Iraq... and our citizens in the port of Beirut.”
Maalouf became the first Lebanese journalist to ever be hosted by an Israeli network, and her comments were widely condemned in the Arab world.
Despite having previously interviewed world leaders, including former Lebanese President Amine Gemayel, on her television program Lel-Rouwad Faqat, and receiving three consecutive awards as the “Boldest Journalist” by the Lebanese Press Syndicate in addition to recognition from across the Arab world, her interview with an Israeli media site led many to brand her a traitor.
“Fifteen years, for sitting in a studio and answering a journalist's questions. I want people to sit with that for a moment, because once you do, the absurdity of it becomes the whole story,” she commented, explaining how the conviction has deeply affected her family and those closest to her.
A vocal critic of Hezbollah, an exile in danger
“A verdict like this doesn't stay confined to a courtroom; it follows you into every phone call home, every plan to visit relatives, every conversation about whether it's safe to attend a wedding or a funeral,” she continued.
While right now there is no urgent need for her to return to her homeland, Maalouf said the sentence was designed to “sit there, indefinitely, as a reminder that the file is open and the door can close at any time.”
“There's a difference between living abroad because you were forced to leave because of safety issues, and living abroad with a fifteen-year sentence on the books with your name on it. One is a decision. The other is a cage with very long walls,” she explained.
As a vocal critic of the Iran-backed terrorist group, Maalouf’s life has long been in danger, and she has received death threats, including threats from individuals closely tied to the former Assad regime in Syria.
In 2006, she told the Post she received a call plainly telling her she was a “dead woman,” a call she attributes to Hezbollah. The call came after she recorded an episode of her show criticizing the group, and more calls would soon follow.
“One of the most disturbing came not from Hezbollah directly but from the Assad camp - one of the sons of the regime publicly threatened to hang me in Sahat al-Umawiyyin, Damascus's great central square, the Umayyad Square.
"To be threatened with a public execution, in public, by name, and to understand that no authority in either Syria or Lebanon would treat it as a crime - that tells you everything you need to know about the environment I was operating in,” she recalled.
“The social media dimension has been relentless. My lawyer eventually compiled and filed a formal lawsuit with Lebanon's Information Department documenting over 500 threat messages sent to my accounts - calls and written messages from unknown numbers and accounts, saying things I won't repeat in full here, but the category was consistent: threats of rape, execution, disappearance. Not one of those cases was ever prosecuted. Five hundred documented threats, filed with the authorities, and nothing. Meanwhile, I'm the one who ended up with a fifteen-year sentence.”
These threats got worse after she wrote a tweet questioning why Israel wouldn’t just rid Lebanon of former Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah.
"If Israel really wants peace, then it should go ahead and prove it by signing an agreement with Hezbollah. To this day, we have yet to rid ourselves of Hassan Nasrallah, who had led us awry in his war against it," she wrote in the 2017 tweet. "If Israel considers Hassan Nasrallah an enemy, then why hasn’t it carried out an airstrike to relieve us of this burden?”
“I said something blunt and, I'll admit, raw - that if Israel genuinely considered Nasrallah an enemy, it should act like it instead of letting him keep dragging our region into other people's wars,” she explained.
“It came from anger, not strategy. Anger at watching Hezbollah fight in Syria, in Yemen, everywhere except in defense of Lebanon itself, while ordinary Lebanese paid the price in isolation, sanctions, and eventually war on our own soil.
"That single statement got a group of lawyers to file an incitement case against me, and by 2018, there was an arrest warrant with my name on it - for words, said in anger, about a man whose actual record includes the assassination of Lebanese officials and a foreign war record most Lebanese never voted for and never wanted.”
Beirut First Investigative Judge, Ghassan Oueidat, issued an arrest warrant in absentia against Maalouf for the slander and defamation of Nasrallah, which notably came after Maalouf filed her own lawsuit against Nasrallah for kidnapping, rape, and murder.
In supporting legal documents, Maalouf also listed “any person who appears to be an active, interfering, partner or instigator” who helped Hezbollah in “incitement and participation of murder and committing acts of kidnapping, torture, rape, displacement, committing war crimes, crimes of genocide and crimes against humanity in Syria, Yemen, Bahrain and Iraq.”
Maalouf was particularly suspicious of why the sentence, after years of legal battles, came now and hinted that it was part of a wider campaign against those who speak out abroad.
“The interviews were in 2021. The sentence lands in 2026. Draw your own conclusions about timing. I have mine,” she said.
“This verdict didn't arrive in a vacuum. It came down within days of two other Lebanese citizens living abroad, Ahmad Yassine and Joumana Gebara, receiving the same sentence - fifteen years, in absentia, for the same broad category of ‘collaboration with Israel.”
Yassine, a professor in Paris, was accused of “inciting the Israeli army to bomb the historic Baalbek Citadel by disseminating information claiming that the citadel housed Hezbollah weapons depots,” while Gebara was said to have praised IDF Arabic spokesperson Avichay Adraee and thanked him for striking Hezbollah targets in Lebanon, in addition to calling for normalization.
"That's not a coincidence, it's a pattern, and it's a pattern that happens to be emerging at the exact moment Hezbollah is under real pressure over its weapons for the first time in decades,” she said.
In March, Beirut banned military activities by Hezbollah after it opened fire on Israel to avenge the killing of Iran's supreme leader. The Shiite Muslim group, established by Iran's IRGC in 1982, said its attack was to avenge "the pure blood" of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei "in defense of Lebanon."
Maalouf said she was given no opportunity to defend herself against the charges of espionage, treason, and incitement after Military Court Investigative Judge Najat Abu Chacra issued her arrest warrant in 2022.
“As for notification or a chance to defend myself - there wasn't one. No summons ever reached me, no court date I could have appeared for even if I'd wanted to, no lawyer appointed who could meaningfully test the case,” Maalouf complained.
“That's how these in-absentia military proceedings against exiled critics work by design: they are built to produce a verdict, not to hear a defense. I found out the way most people did - through the news.”
Maalouf admitted that she expected some kind of legal response to her interview, having seen the response to a single Tweet, but hadn’t anticipated that both could “eventually be folded into the same ’collaboration with the enemy framework, years apart, as if the state had been keeping a running tally.”
The heavy sentence comes as Beirut has sought ways to alleviate the burden of overcrowding in prisons, seeking to employ a general amnesty law which would reduce sentences and potentially see thousands of prisoners released.
As of 2023, 80% of those detained in Lebanese prisons were awaiting trial, according to the Lebanese Interior Ministry. At the time, detention centers across Lebanon had a capacity of 4,760, but they held 8,502 prisoners, including 1,094 who actually had been sentenced, Lebanon’s Internal Security Forces reported.
Despite seeking to resolve the burden by reducing sentencing, the courts have handed down long sentences to individuals based on words alone.
“Here is the part I want your readers to really absorb,” Maalouf said. “ While I was being handed fifteen years for giving interviews, the same military court system has, in recent months, processed Hezbollah operatives caught transporting weapons in direct violation of the new state ban on the group's arms - and handed down sentences amounting to time served and a token fine.”
Further highlighting the inequality in Lebanon’s legal systems, a pro-Hezbollah media figure threatened to execute Maalouf on camera while she was visiting the United Arab Emirates. The violent comments, Maalouf said, were treated as a political commentary rather than an actual threat, and authorities did nothing to protect her.
“Words versus weapons. Speech versus smuggled rockets. And speech gets the harsher penalty. Now, layered on top of that, the general amnesty law is working its way through parliament right now - the largest amnesty Lebanon has considered since the civil war ended.”
Admitting there were “good-faith arguments” for the potential legislation, Maalouf asserted that “when you put the amnesty debate next to my verdict and Yassine and Gebara's, the message becomes unmistakable: the legal system isn't grading offenses by harm. It's grading them by whether you embarrassed Hezbollah. That's not a justice system prioritizing crimes - it's a justice system prioritizing loyalties.”
Addressing recent hopes that discussions of direct talks between Beirut and Jerusalem could be a sign that the countries may be inching toward normalization, Maalouf dashed the possibility as not within the realm of possibility, arguing that her case highlighted that the divide was still too great.
“You cannot have a serious national conversation about your relationship with a neighboring state when simply appearing on that state's television is classified, by your own courts, as treason,” she stressed. “Normalization, even the quiet, unofficial kind, requires a society that's allowed to debate it. Right now, Lebanon's legal architecture doesn't permit the debate to exist. It pre-empts it by criminalizing the people who might start it.”
Maalouf said Hezbollah didn’t need to be in power to decide what laws Beirut gets to write; there only needed to be a collective understanding on “which laws will and won't be enforced, and against whom.”
“That's the real architecture of fear here: not a single explicit rule, but a thousand unwritten ones that every Lebanese journalist, politician, and ordinary citizen carries around in their head before they open their mouth,” she described. “The government's recent moves against Hezbollah's weapons are real, and I don't want to minimize them - they matter, and they took courage.
"But the balance of power on the ground, and especially inside parts of the judiciary and security establishment, hasn't caught up to the rhetoric yet. Verdicts like mine are the proof. The state can ban Hezbollah's arms in a cabinet decision; it apparently still can't protect a journalist's right to give an interview.”
While what is being said may be heavily controlled by a system of norms and laws, what is thought by the “vast majority of Lebanese” who “never asked for and had no say in starting or stopping,” has been decided based on Hezbollah’s actions, she said, hinting that the Iranian proxy had unintentionally created a hostile environment for itself outside of the government institutions it influences.
“People watched their towns get hit, their economy collapse further, their sons sent to fight someone else's war for someone else's regional project,” Maalouf said. “I said in 2017 what a lot of people now say quietly at their own dinner tables. The difference is I said it on camera, and that's precisely why I'm answering your questions from outside the country instead of inside it.”
Framing much of those discussions is the sectarian divisions Lebanon has long tried to suppress mention of since the end of its deadly civil war.
For Christians, Maalouf said their ability to live in Lebanon safely depends on their ability to “accommodate and “stay quiet” about “Hezbollah's arms, nod along with the ‘resistance’ narrative, don't make too much noise about Iran's role in your country's politics.
For many, the choice is a simple one. However, for voices like Maalouf and Hanin Ghaddar, who previously spoke to The Post about her own judicial struggles in Lebanon, the issue of sovereignty is too important to trade a quiet life for.
“If you're a Christian who insists on the other version of Lebanese identity - sovereign, pluralistic, answerable to Beirut and not to Tehran - the space to exist in that identity narrows very quickly,” Maalouf said.
“Not because anyone passes a law against being a proud, independent-minded Lebanese Christian. They don't have to. The pressure isn't always written into legislation. Sometimes it's a court file. Sometimes it's a sentence that arrives five years after the fact, attached to your name, hanging over the people you love.”
“I don't experience this as a sectarian grievance in the narrow sense - plenty of Sunni and Shia Lebanese feel exactly the same squeeze when they criticize Hezbollah. But as a Christian, my case has become part of a larger argument this country still hasn't resolved: whether Lebanon belongs to the Lebanese, on Lebanese terms, or whether it belongs to whoever controls the weapons,” she continued.
Concluding her talk with The Post, Maalouf asserted that while “a military court can write whatever number it wants on a piece of paper,” it didn’t make her guilty of anything, and it “doesn't make Hezbollah's record any less documented. What it does is tell you, with total clarity, who that court is actually protecting, and it isn't Lebanon.”