DOJ Builds Oct. 7 Case Against Louisiana Man on Testimony From Anonymous Israeli Spy

The US Department of Justice is prosecuting a Louisiana resident for allegedly joining the October 7 attack using evidence supplied by Israel and authenticated by an Israeli intelligence agent whose real identity is classified under Israeli law.

Mahmoud Amin Ya'qub al-Muhtadi, 33, was arrested in October 2025. Prosecutors say he belonged to the military wing of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and helped mobilize fighters on the morning of the Hamas-led assault. He allegedly returned to Gaza afterward, then lied about his DFLP ties to obtain a US visa in 2024 before immigrating that September.

Muhtadi has pleaded not guilty. His family has called the charges "fabricated" and "false." Prosecutors have already been forced to revise their case: a superseding indictment filed June 17 dropped the phrase "resulting in death" from the original conspiracy charge and added new counts, according to reporting by The Advocate.

Israel supplied the tip and the evidence

Court documents show Israel first alerted US authorities to Muhtadi. The core evidence against him, cell tower data placing his phone near Kibbutz Kfar Aza and recordings of calls he allegedly made that day, comes from an Israeli cell phone provider and was handed to American prosecutors by Israeli authorities.

To vouch for the authenticity of that material, the DOJ has summoned an Israeli intelligence official identified in court filings only as "Avi." According to filings noted by journalist Ken Silva, this Avi is a longtime employee of Israel's security agency who now directs the Assessment Division of the Israeli Bureau of Counter-Terror Financing. Israeli law keeps his actual identity classified, meaning Muhtadi's defense cannot fully investigate his background, biases, or track record before he takes the stand.

A familiar name from the Holy Land trials

This is not the first time a source called "Avi" from Israeli intelligence has shaped a major US terrorism prosecution. During the 2007 and 2008 trials of Holy Land Foundation directors, an Israeli Security Agency official using the same pseudonym gave testimony that US prosecutors leaned on heavily to argue the Palestinian American defendants were Hamas operatives.

At Israel's request, Judge A. Joe Fish cleared the courtroom of everyone except attorneys, government officials, and immediate family of the defendants so that Avi could testify anonymously, an arrangement widely described as unprecedented for a foreign intelligence official appearing as an expert witness in a US courtroom.

On the stand, that Avi offered impressionistic rather than documentary evidence, telling jurors he recognized "the smell of Hamas" in keychains and posters. The first Holy Land trial ended in a hung jury after the government conceded no foundation money had reached any Hamas-controlled zakat committee. The retrial produced convictions, a shift The Grayzone's reporting attributes in part to Avi's testimony and disputed IDF documents.

Lt. Col. Avi Kalo, an Israeli military intelligence officer who advised US prosecutors in the Holy Land case according to his own biography at Reichman University, contacted The Grayzone after publication to say he is not the anonymous Avi in either the Holy Land case or the Muhtadi prosecution.

Why it matters

Whether or not the current Avi is the same person, the pattern is the same: Israeli intelligence supplying the evidence, an anonymous Israeli official certifying it, and a US defendant unable to fully confront the source. Civil liberties advocates have long warned that anonymous foreign intelligence testimony undermines a defendant's constitutional right to confront witnesses. The Muhtadi case suggests that practice, pioneered in the Holy Land trials nearly two decades ago, has become a durable feature of how Israeli intelligence shapes American terrorism prosecutions.