A Tajik National Was Paid in Crypto to Film Haifa Port and a Defense Plant. Prosecutors Say the Handlers Worked for Iran.
State prosecutors filed a 14-count indictment on July 6, 2026 at Tel Aviv District Court against Bekhruz Shakhriv Dodobaev, 33, a Tajik national whose temporary Israeli residency permit had already lapsed by May. According to the charging document, Dodobaev spent February through June 2026 collecting and transmitting footage, photographs, and coordinates — including video of Haifa Port’s shoreline and vessels, and of the Elbit Systems Cyclone aerostructures plant in the Western Galilee town of Ahihud — to handlers prosecutors identify as agents of Iranian intelligence, paid through cryptocurrency wallets.
He is not an outlier. Dodobaev is one of more than 60 people Israeli authorities have indicted since October 2023 on charges of spying for Iran — a pace security officials themselves now call an “epidemic.” The Shin Bet says Iranian recruitment attempts against Israelis and foreign residents jumped 400 percent in 2025 alone, run almost entirely through Telegram messages offering small cash-and-crypto payments for what starts out looking like harmless freelance work.
Dodobaev has not entered a plea. Nothing in the indictment has been tested at trial, and under Israeli law — as under American law — he is presumed innocent unless and until a court finds otherwise. What follows describes what prosecutors allege, sourced to the charging document and the reporting built on it.
- 14 counts — contact with a foreign agent, nine counts of communicating information that could benefit an enemy, and four counts of communicating information to an enemy with intent to harm state security · Source: The Jerusalem Post
- 33 — Dodobaev's age; his temporary Israeli residency permit had already expired by May, the month prosecutors say he filmed the Elbit facility · Source: Jerusalem Post, JNS
- Feb.–June 2026 — the span of alleged assignments laid out in the indictment, tracking the Israel-Iran war and its aftermath · Source: Jerusalem Post
- 25 — Israelis and foreign residents indicted for Iran-linked espionage in 2025 alone, per the Shin Bet's own annual accounting · Source: Shin Bet 2025 summary
- 400% — increase in Iranian recruitment attempts against Israelis in 2025 versus 2024, itself already an elevated year · Source: Shin Bet, CNN, IBTimes UK
- 60+ — Israelis indicted on charges of spying for Iran since October 2023 — a pace Israeli security officials call an "epidemic" · Source: CNN, IBTimes UK
The indictment, filed by state prosecutors at Tel Aviv District Court, lays out fourteen distinct counts against Dodobaev: one count of contact with a foreign agent, nine counts of communicating information that could benefit an enemy, and four counts of communicating information to an enemy with intent to harm state security. Under Israeli law, the first charge criminalizes maintaining contact with someone acting for a hostile intelligence service; the latter two escalate depending on what was actually passed along and why.
Dodobaev is a Tajik citizen who had been living in Israel on a temporary residency permit that, prosecutors note, had already expired by the time he allegedly carried out his final assignment in May. (Earlier wire reports, filed at the arrest stage before the formal indictment named him, transliterated the same defendant as “Behrouz Sobirgon” — this report follows the Jerusalem Post’s indictment-stage spelling, sourced directly to the charging document, as the more authoritative of the two.) He has not entered a plea.
According to the indictment, the approach began the way most of these cases now do: on Telegram, in late 2025 or early 2026, while Dodobaev was looking for temporary work. A profile using the name “Anna” offered to pay him to photograph parked cars — a task with no obvious purpose, the kind of low-stakes assignment Israeli investigators say Iranian handlers use to test a recruit’s willingness before revealing what the job actually is. Prosecutors say Anna eventually told him the work was connected to an Iranian organization. He kept going anyway.
From February through June, the indictment alleges, Dodobaev was directed by three handlers using the names Anna, Uri, and Polina — identified by prosecutors as Iranian foreign agents — and paid through digital wallets for assignments that escalated well past parked cars: sending footage, photographs, and precise coordinates from locations where Iranian missiles had struck during the war. Prosecutors also allege Dodobaev did not stay a passive asset. He is accused of distributing purported job advertisements in migrant neighborhoods in Ashdod and Tel Aviv, each carrying Telegram contact information supplied by his handlers, in an effort to widen the same recruitment pipeline that had caught him.
A man from Tajikistan holding a Russian passport was arrested in Israel on suspicion of spying for Iran. A joint Shin Bet-police investigation found he'd been in contact with an Iranian handler since January — documenting missile-impact sites and taking photos near Haifa Port and a sensitive security facility in the north.
Dodobaev has been charged, not convicted, and has entered no plea. Everything above describing his alleged conduct — the Telegram recruitment, the handler names, the recruitment ads — comes from the prosecution’s charging document, not from a courtroom finding of fact.
Haifa is not a random backdrop. It is the home port of the Israeli Navy and the largest of Israel’s three international seaports, handling roughly 30 million tons of cargo a year — more than any other Israeli harbor. Because Israel has no functioning overland freight routes through Syria or Lebanon and only limited capacity at Eilat on the Red Sea, Haifa and its sister port at Ashdod are, for most practical purposes, the country’s only door to seaborne trade: wheat and grain imports that underpin food security, petroleum products that feed domestic energy infrastructure, and the deep-water Bayport container terminal, operated by an international consortium since 2021 and privatized in 2023 to a group led by India’s Adani Ports.
Prosecutors say Dodobaev traveled to Haifa Port and filmed the shoreline, vessels, and port area, including close-up footage of individual ships — exactly the kind of granular, ground-level detail that satellite imagery and open-source tracking do not provide, and exactly what a targeting cell would want if it were deciding where a missile or a saboteur could do the most damage to a war-critical supply line.
Iran's Revolutionary Guards said Monday they launched a missile attack on industrial facilities in Haifa in response to what they described as a US- and Israeli-backed strike on one of Iran's petrochemical plants.
The other site named in the indictment is less famous than the port but no less sensitive. Cyclone, a subsidiary of Elbit Systems — Israel’s largest privately owned defense company — has operated out of Ahihud, in the Western Galilee, since 1970, manufacturing composite and metal aerostructure assemblies for the F-35, F-16, F-15, and F/A-18 fighter programs and for Boeing’s 787 commercial line. It is a working link in NATO-adjacent defense-industrial supply chains, not a symbolic target.
In May, according to the indictment, Dodobaev was sent to the Cyclone facility under the pretext that he was documenting a missile-impact site — the same cover story used for his earlier, legitimate-seeming assignments. Prosecutors allege he reported reaching a secured area, described seeing an Elbit sign, and transmitted coordinates and video back to his handlers. It was, allegedly, both his most sensitive assignment and among his last: the same recruitment pipeline he had been paid to expand into Ashdod and Tel Aviv’s migrant neighborhoods was the trail investigators used to close in on him.
Dodobaev’s case broke the same week as another: on July 3, prosecutors charged Eli Lavon, a 21-year-old dual American-Israeli yeshiva student, with the same core statutes after he allegedly answered a Telegram job ad while visiting family in the US in November 2025, then allegedly carried out surveillance assignments in Jerusalem once he returned — allegedly filming an abandoned building and a specific grocery store for a total of roughly $1,379in cryptocurrency. The dollar figures in these cases are strikingly small; that is close to the point. Israeli intelligence officials describe the Iranian model as “spray and pray”: thousands of Telegram messages offering payment for tasks that start as graffiti or a photograph and escalate, mission by mission, toward military sites and, in some documented cases, requests to harm named individuals.
“I have not previously seen so many attempts — and some successful cases — of spying against Israel.”
Gonen Ben Itzhak, former Shin Bet handler · to Fox News Digital
The Shin Bet’s own 2025 annual accounting puts numbers to that impression: 25 Israelis and foreign residents indicted for Iran-linked espionage that year, 120 separate incidents thwarted, and a 400 percent jump in recruitment attempts over 2024 — itself already an elevated year. Since October 2023, more than 60 Israelis have been indicted on Iran-espionage charges, a figure Israeli security officials themselves now describe as an epidemic rather than an aberration.
Dodobaev’s case now proceeds through Tel Aviv District Court on the standard track for a security-offense indictment: a plea, evidentiary motions, and eventually a trial or a negotiated resolution, none of which has happened yet. Neither the Iranian government nor state media have commented on the specific allegations — consistent with Tehran’s general practice of not responding to individual Israeli espionage-case announcements even as the broader pattern of recruitment attempts continues.
What is not in dispute is the scale of the problem the Shin Bet is describing in public for the first time in these terms: a low-cost, high-volume recruitment operation that no longer requires a trained case officer, a dead drop, or even a face-to-face meeting — just a Telegram account, a burner wallet, and a target willing to take a small payment for a photograph.
Bekhruz Shakhriv Dodobaev has been charged with 14 counts of security offenses. He has entered no plea and is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty in a court of law. This report characterizes his alleged conduct exactly as the prosecution’s charging document and the sourced reporting above characterize it — not as an established fact.
