BEIRUT: Hezbollah MP Nawwaf Moussawi claimed Monday that U.S. Central Intelligence Agency officers were meeting Lebanese agents in public in the Metn area and called on the government to act to deal with U.S. intelligence in the same way they deal with collaboration with Israel.

“There are currently open meetings held by American intelligence agents in Lebanon in restaurants and nightclubs in Dbayyeh and Jounieh,” Moussawi told LBCI in an interview.

He also said that among the agents are a doctor, a researcher and a journalist, and asked them to surrender to the Lebanese security services or to the resistance’s security apparatus.

Moussawi’s remarks came three days after Hezbollah aired a report on the party’s Al-Manar television which said the CIA had a team of 10 officers, including women, assigned to recruit Lebanese spies tasked with gathering information on Hezbollah fighters.

The report also said that the U.S. Embassy in Awkar, north of Beirut, functions as a venue to recruit Lebanese informants.

Moussawi said the information gathered by U.S. intelligence agents in Lebanon served the interest of Israel, describing it as a dangerous development. “[We] need to take the same political, judicial and security measures [we take] against those working for Israeli intelligence and against those who enroll in U.S. intelligence.”

Hezbollah’s deputy leader Sheikh Naim Qassem said last week that what has been revealed about the CIA’s operations in Lebanon was only a small part of the information the party has acquired on the matter. He said Hezbollah will disclose more information at a later stage.

Hezbollah, labeled by Washington as a terrorist organization, has claimed victory in what it described as its “intelligence war” with the CIA, describing it as a flagrant assault on Lebanon’s sovereignty.

U.S. officials said last month that a group of CIA informants in Lebanon were captured earlier this year by Hezbollah, damaging agency operations against the party and raising concern that spies who had spent months or years on the CIA payroll could be tortured or killed.

The breach has forced the CIA to suspend some of its espionage efforts in a country that has long been a crossroad for spy services and to launch a damage-assessment effort in order to determine if other assets – or even CIA case officers stationed in Beirut – are in jeopardy.

In June, Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah said two party members were found to be working for the CIA and a third member was working for another unidentified foreign entity. The U.S. Embassy in Beirut denied the accusation at the time.

In another statement, Moussawi said an Israeli attack on Lebanon was no longer an “easy choice” for any Israeli official to take – either for his own interests or due to U.S. demand – because of Hezbollah’s increasing military might.

“Thanks to the resistance’s mounting capabilities which led to the rise of a new situation in Lebanon, an [Israeli] aggression has become like a suicide for the Israeli enemy and an end to its existence in this region,” Moussawi said in a speech in the southern town of Zibeqine.

He said the resistance has confidence in its people, army and its material and non-material capabilities to achieve victory in any future confrontation with Israel.

Moussawi scoffed at the calls for launching a regional war to change the current balance of power by toppling the regime in Syria, an event that would lead to the loss of the resistance’s strategic depth. Syria is an ally of Hezbollah and the party’s arms shipments come through Syria.