BEIRUT -- Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah denied on Friday that the Lebanese Islamic resistance movement is seeking to destabilize the Cairo government.

A man, Lebanese citizen Sami Shihab, is one of 49 people being held by the Egyptian authorities accused of plotting “hostile operations” in Egypt.
“The brother Sami Shihab is a member of Hezbollah. We do not deny it and we are not ashamed of it,” Nasrallah said on the group's Al-Manar television.
Shihab, he added, was working to help the Palestinian resistance against Israeli occupation.
“What he was doing on the Egyptian-Palestinian border was logistic work to help the Palestinian brothers to transport equipment for the resistance in Palestine,” Nasrallah said.
“If helping the Palestinians is a crime, I officially admit to my crime. And if it is an accusation, we are proud of it. Everybody knows that this is not the first time Hezbollah has tried to furnish arms to the Palestinians.”
Egyptian prosecutors claim the arrested men had been commissioned by Nasrallah to conduct attacks in Egypt.
“All the accusations are lies and a fabrication aimed at setting the people of Egypt against Hezbollah,” Nasrallah said in his address Friday night, adding that “no more than 10” people had been aiding Shihab in his mission.
“I do not know where the 50 people come from .. most of them have no links with Hezbollah,” he said.
Egypt's public prosecutor on Thursday ordered the 49 suspects kept in custody for a further 15 days for further questioning.
The suspects are also accused of espionage, forging official documents and preparing explosives.
A security official said the suspects were arrested across Egypt, including the capital Cairo and in Nuwaiba, in the south.
Arrests were first made in November and the rest of the group rounded up by the end of last month, the official said.
One of the suspects' lawyers, Abdel Moneim Abdel Qudus, said in Cairo that legal teams still had no access to the suspects.
“We have said all along that we have not been able to meet any detainees or attend interrogations. We don't know what is happening,” he said.
Adel Gibril and his brother, both Egyptian factory workers, were arrested in El-Arish, near Rafah, on December 3. Gibril was released after 56 days in detention, he said, claiming he was subjected to torture in a Cairo jail.
“They sent us to Cairo, and I was blindfolded and manacled for seven days. They kept asking, why were you sent here, what did you do? I said I don't know. They said stand outside and think it over,” he said.
“I stood outside for an hour, stripped naked, and they brought me back. I was held for 56 days. I was beaten and electrocuted in sensitive parts,” he said, adding that he was not asked other questions. His brother Nassir is still in jail.
Hezbollah is a vocal supporter of Palestinian democratically elected Hamas, which is very popular among the population of Egypt.
He accused Cairo of complicity in the Israeli blockade on Gaza and his accusations added to the Egyptian President's unpopularity in the country.
Medics say more than 1,400 Palestinians -- mainly civilians -- were killed in Israel's 22-day assault on Gaza, launched on December 27.
Human rights groups, both international and Israeli, slammed Israel’s siege of Gaza, branding it “collective punishment.”
A group of international lawyers and human rights activists had also accused Israel of committing “genocide” through its crippling blockade of the Strip.
Gaza is still considered under Israeli occupation as Israel controls air, sea and land access to the Strip.
The Rafah crossing with Egypt, Gaza's sole border crossing that bypasses Israel, rarely opens as Egypt is under immense US and Israeli pressure to keep the crossing shut.
Fatah has little administrative say in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and has no power in Arab east Jerusalem, both of which were illegally occupied by Israel in 1967.
Israel also currently occupies the Lebanese Shabaa Farms and the Syrian Golan Heights.
Hezbollah, originally a resistance group formed to counter an Israeli occupation of south Lebanon, had forced the Israeli military out of Lebanon in 2000.
Israel had waged a bloody 34-day war on Lebanon in the summer of 2006.
But Israeli flights over Lebanon occur on an almost daily basis and are in breach of UN Security Council resolution 1710, which in August 2006 ended the war.
With huge public support in the Lebanese south, Hezbollah is poised to make stronger political gains in the upcoming parliamentary elections in Lebanon next June.
(Source: Middle East Online)
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