Lebanon did not reach out to prominent journalist Maria Maalouf before handing her a 15-year sentence in absentia last week over remarks she made five years earlier, the US-based Christian-Maronite writer told The Jerusalem Post late on Monday night.

Maalouf was convicted for her appearance on KAN News in 2021, during which she stated that Hassan Nasrallah and Iran's party in Lebanon had taken the state hostage and returned it to the stone age. The recent tensions with Saudi Arabia show that Hezbollah has cut Lebanon off from its Arab neighbors. She has directly told Nasrallah that he is a murderer who has killed children in Yemen, Syria, and Iraq, as well as citizens in the port of Beirut.

Maalouf became the first Lebanese journalist ever hosted by an Israeli network, and her remarks drew widespread condemnation across the Arab world.

Despite prior interviews with world leaders such as former Lebanese President Amine Gemayel on her program Lel-Rouwad Faqat, along with three straight awards as the Boldest Journalist from the Lebanese Press Syndicate and recognition throughout the Arab region, her decision to speak with an Israeli outlet led many to label her a traitor.

Fifteen years for sitting in a studio and answering a journalist's questions. I want people to pause and consider that, because once they do the absurdity stands out as the real story, she said, noting how the conviction has taken a heavy toll on her family and close circle.

A vocal critic of Hezbollah, an exile in danger

A verdict like this does not remain limited to a courtroom. It follows you into every phone call home, every plan to visit relatives, and every discussion about whether it is safe to attend a wedding or a funeral, she added.

Although there is currently no pressing reason for her to return home, Maalouf said the sentence was meant to remain in place indefinitely as a reminder that the file stays open and the door can shut at any moment.

There is a difference between living abroad because safety concerns forced you to leave and living abroad with a fifteen-year sentence attached to your name. One is a choice. The other is a cage with very long walls, she explained.

As a vocal critic of the Iran-backed terrorist group, Maalouf has long faced danger and received death threats, including some from individuals linked to the former Assad regime in Syria.

In 2006 she told the Post she received a call stating plainly that she was a dead woman, a call she attributes to Hezbollah. The call followed an episode of her show in which she criticized the group, and additional calls soon arrived.

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 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 will not 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 am the one who ended up with a fifteen-year sentence.

These threats intensified after she posted a tweet questioning why Israel would not simply remove former Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah from Lebanon.

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 has it not carried out an airstrike to relieve us of this burden?

I said something blunt and, I will 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 prompted 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, arrived now and hinted that it formed 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 did not 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 is not a coincidence, it is a pattern, and it is 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 was not one. No summons ever reached me, no court date I could have appeared for even if I had wanted to, no lawyer appointed who could meaningfully test the case, Maalouf complained.

That is 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 had not 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 percent 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 is not grading offenses by harm. It is grading them by whether you embarrassed Hezbollah. That is not a justice system prioritizing crimes, it is 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 is allowed to debate it. Right now, Lebanon's legal architecture does not permit the debate to exist. It pre-empts it by criminalizing the people who might start it.

Maalouf said Hezbollah did not 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 will not be enforced, and against whom.

That is 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 do not 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, has not 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 cannot 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.