The Yemeni war, which has been ongoing since 2015 between the Yemeni Houthis, who control the capital Sana’a, and another group of Yemenis mostly backed by the Gulf Coalition led by Saudi Arabia, is still being used by various sides in Lebanon and the Middle East to blame and impugn one another. Lebanon’s Hezbollah party - which is classified as a terrorist organization by Saudi Arabia and several Gulf states - is bearing the bulk of the Gulf-led attack via newspapers and platforms (read a report by the Saudi-run Independent Arabia) who charge that it actively trains and equips the Houthis, especially by dispatching fighters and experts from Lebanon, a claim which the party’s officials, at the head of whom is Secretary-General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, have always denied. The Arab Coalition states also accuse Lebanon and Hezbollah of hosting Yemeni media platforms loyal to the Iranian-supported Houthis, since they broadcast their anti-Arab Coalition media from inside a district largely controlled by Hezbollah (the “Southern Suburbs”).
On November 4, 2021 Dubai-based Lebanese journalist Maria Maaloof posted what she claimed to be a leaked document of a fatwa (a religiously binding ruling) by Nasrallah, urging Lebanese women (belonging to the Shi’i sect) to marry fighters from Ansarullah (the official party name for the Houthis). The alleged document, which was filled with grammatical errors, as opposed to Nasrallah’s customary precision in written and spoken texts, was said to be a Shi’i religious fatwa by the party’s chief, offering a 300% increase in the wedding grant offered by Hezbollah to Lebanese women who wish to seal a “pleasure” marriage with Yemeni Houthis.
Media outlets, especially pro-Arab Coalition Arab and Yemeni ones, quickly circulated this leaked document as genuine, including the electronic Al-Mashhad al-Yemeni newspaper, Al-Mahjar website, Yemen Debate website, and Khlaasa.net website among others.
After extensive quarrelling between the supporters of the Yemeni forces backed by the Arab Coalition and the supporters of the Houthis, which moved to the Twitter pages of the Lebanese, the Lebanese Annahar newspaper carried a denial attributed to a source in Hezbollah, who said that the document was fake (- link to Annahar article). In their reporting, the source pointed to “numerous grammatical mistakes in both documents. Hezbollah Secretary-General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah would never have written that way,” adding: “This is also not the template usually adopted by Hezbollah. Therefore, there is absolutely no truth to both documents.”
Fact Check Assessment: Very Likely False
The assessment of this information reveals it is very likely false for several reasons. First, Hezbollah’s secretary-general clearly denied it in person. Indeed, on November 26, 2021, Hezbollah Secretary-General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah delivered a speech in which he tackled the fake news and documents targeting his party and being attributed to him in media outlets and on social media sites. In regard to the Lebanese marrying Yemenis, he said: “In any case, what is being done is very silly, and what is sillier is the content. Unfortunately, there are people who believe these sites and documents. They say: Look at what Hezbollah is doing! And then they build on that. For example, someone circulated a fake document, which I came to learn about. Later, I saw some Lebanese television channels also addressing it. Let me tell you what it said just for a laugh: It said that Hezbollah issued a circular which urged young men from the Baabda district to marry women from specific civil status registries to increase the number of voters. None of that is true. Another example is the document circulated by someone, saying we urged Hezbollah’s youth to marry Yemenis. If the goal in Baabda is to increase the number of voters, why would we marry from Yemen?!”
The second reason for our Very Likely False determination is that the Lebanese Annahar newspaper, which is well-known for its anti-Hezbollah editorial line and which is perceived as close to the Gulf and the West in general, decided to carry a denial - without challenging it - from a source in Hezbollah, who denied the veracity of the two documents posted by Maaloof.
It should also be noted that the November 4, 2021 “leaked document” was not the first document leaked by Maaloof which was debunked. Indeed, two days later, on November 6, 2021, she also posted a document about “Increasing signs pointing to return of pro-Hezbollah Lebanese from Persian Gulf States,” which was also denied by Hezbollah’s media office according to Annahar’s own fact-checking article linked above.
Finally, Maaloof’s bitter, longstanding opposition to Hezbollah undercuts her objectivity when it comes to revealing “leaked documents” that aren’t verified by third parties. Indeed, in 2017, she called on her Twitter page for killing the leader of the party, writing: “If Israel views Hassan Nasrallah as an enemy, why does it not carry out an air raid that will rid us of him, so that we believe it and protect ourselves?”
These statements created personal, legal problems for Maaloof in Lebanon, preventing her from returning to her country after a group of Lebanese attorneys filed a lawsuit against her before the Public Prosecutor at the Court of Cassation for instigating murder and generating strife, believing that what she wrote was an electronically committed crime. In January 2018, an arrest warrant in absentia was issued against her (Al-Joumhouria).
