Israel

[Brisketexan 105168]

2 minutes ago, Rex Kramer said:

Would Israel, regardless of PM, be okay with the presence of Palestinians if they were peaceful?  Don’t say “most Palestinians are”. Please answer these 2 questions - 1) would they be okay with their presence and 2) would they work toward and grant statehood rights to a peaceful Palestine?

No.  As demonstrated quite plainly by the ongoing violent attacks, sanctioned and protected by the Israeli state, in the West Bank.  You know, the place where Hamas isn't the government, and the October 7th attacks were not launched from.

When leadership tells you who they are, believe them.  That's very, very true of Hamas -- they are awful, evil pieces of shit.  The Palestinians in Gaza are led by the worst of the worst.  Unfortunately, it's also true of the Israeli right, which currently governs Israel.  They have made similar pledges of extermination/ethnic cleansing.  The Israeli state is currently led by the worst of the worst.

Excusing that because Hamas is bad is flat-out evil.  Just own it.  

[Rex Kramer 1343]

1 hour ago, Brisketexan said:

No.  As demonstrated quite plainly by the ongoing violent attacks, sanctioned and protected by the Israeli state, in the West Bank.  You know, the place where Hamas isn't the government, and the October 7th attacks were not launched from.

When leadership tells you who they are, believe them.  That's very, very true of Hamas -- they are awful, evil pieces of shit.  The Palestinians in Gaza are led by the worst of the worst.  Unfortunately, it's also true of the Israeli right, which currently governs Israel.  They have made similar pledges of extermination/ethnic cleansing.  The Israeli state is currently led by the worst of the worst.

Excusing that because Hamas is bad is flat-out evil.  Just own it.  

I will never equate the Israeli right with Hamas. You do you though. I’m fine being flat-out evil in your eyes - happy to own it. 

[Brian Fantana 6689]

Haha he can't even address the salient points. Just sticks his dumbfuck head in the ground. I love this site.

[Rex Kramer 1343]

8 minutes ago, Brian Fantana said:

Haha he can't even address the salient points. Just sticks his dumbfuck head in the ground. I love this site.

I made my point. I firmly believe Palestine would get everything they want* if they’d stop shooting katyushas at Israel. But they can’t. 

*Their leadership doesn’t want peace. Hasn’t historically been down with a 2-state solution. They want the violence. Because they’re livelihood is bringing Jews down. 

[PRONG HORN 3151]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Brian Fantana 6689]

[WhatTheBuck 28793]

This is from 11 years ago. How many of these kids are serving in the IDF right now and fulfilling their lifelong dream of killing Arabs?

 

[PRONG HORN 3151]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Chuckie Finster 22702]

 

 

 

 

[Brian Fantana 6689]

Here's my shocked face:

[Brisketexan 105168]

41 minutes ago, Chuckie Finster said:

 

 

 

 

Youth voters and Palestinian voters in America: "But I just can't vote for Joe Biden, because he won't join us in "from the river to the sea" chants for Palestine!"

Fucking.  Idiots.

[Chuckie Finster 22702]

1 hour ago, Brisketexan said:

Youth voters and Palestinian voters in America: "But I just can't vote for Joe Biden, because he won't join us in "from the river to the sea" chants for Palestine!"

Fucking.  Idiots.

There is definitely a vocal contingent of the population more concerned with getting Biden to chant "Free Palestine!" than actually freeing Palestine.

[Brian Fantana 6689]

Biden is an old school Zionist and Trump is a Zionist because his base demands it. Some would say there is functionally no difference in these, but they're wrong. Biden at least seems to have been restraining Israel to the best of his ability, Trump would be infinitely worse for the people of Palestine.

[bolverk 29694]

Slovenia becomes the fourth European country to recognize a Palestinian state in the last few weeks.

Slovenia is the latest European country to recognize a Palestinian state. The country’s parliament voted Tuesday in support of the move, following in the recent steps of Spain, Ireland and Norway.

Slovenia’s prime minister has said he sped up efforts to recognize a State of Palestine in reaction to Israel’s expanding invasion of the southern Gaza city of Rafah. The monthlong offensive has largely cut off the flow of food, medicine and other supplies to Palestinians who are facing widespread hunger.

[TexArcher 37989]

4 minutes ago, bolverk said:

Slovenia becomes the fourth European country to recognize a Palestinian state in the last few weeks.

Slovenia is the latest European country to recognize a Palestinian state. The country’s parliament voted Tuesday in support of the move, following in the recent steps of Spain, Ireland and Norway.

Slovenia’s prime minister has said he sped up efforts to recognize a State of Palestine in reaction to Israel’s expanding invasion of the southern Gaza city of Rafah. The monthlong offensive has largely cut off the flow of food, medicine and other supplies to Palestinians who are facing widespread hunger.

 

Wonder what Trump and his chain immigration wife will have to say about this shithole country speaking up....

 

[bolverk 29694]

 

[bolverk 29694]

Israel Secretly Targets U.S. Lawmakers With Influence Campaign on Gaza War
Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs ordered the operation, which used fake social media accounts urging U.S. lawmakers to fund Israel’s military, according to officials and documents about the effort.

Israel organized and paid for an influence campaign last year targeting U.S. lawmakers and the American public with pro-Israel messaging, as it aimed to foster support for its actions in the war with Gaza, according to officials involved in the effort and documents related to the operation.

The covert campaign was commissioned by Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, a government body that connects Jews around the world with the State of Israel, four Israeli officials said. The ministry allocated about $2 million to the operation and hired Stoic, a political marketing firm in Tel Aviv, to carry it out, according to the officials and the documents.

The campaign began in October and remains active on the platform X. At its peak, it used hundreds of fake accounts that posed as real Americans on X, Facebook and Instagram to post pro-Israel comments. The accounts focused on U.S. lawmakers, particularly ones who are Black and Democrats, such as Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader from New York, and Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia, with posts urging them to continue funding Israel’s military.

ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence-powered chatbot, was used to generate many of the posts. The campaign also created three fake English-language news sites featuring pro-Israel articles.

The Israeli government’s connection to the influence operation, which The New York Times verified with four current and former members of the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and documents about the campaign, has not previously been reported. FakeReporter, an Israeli misinformation watchdog, identified the effort in March. Last week, Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, and OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, said they had also found and disrupted the operation.

The secretive campaign signals the lengths Israel was willing to go to sway American opinion on the war in Gaza. The United States has long been one of Israel’s staunchest allies, with President Biden recently signing a $15 billion military aid package for the country. But the conflict has been unpopular with many Americans, who have called for Mr. Biden to withdraw support for Israel in the face of mounting civilian deaths in Gaza.

cont'd

Spoiler

The operation is the first documented case of the Israeli government’s organizing a campaign to influence the U.S. government, social media experts said. While coordinated government-backed campaigns are not uncommon, they are typically difficult to prove. Iran, North Korea, China, Russia and the United States are widely believed to back similar efforts around the world, but often mask their involvement by outsourcing the work to private companies or running them through a third country.

“Israel’s role in this is reckless and probably ineffective,” said Achiya Schatz, the executive director of FakeReporter. That Israel “ran an operation that interferes in U.S. politics is extremely irresponsible.”

Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs denied involvement in the campaign and said it had no connection to Stoic. Stoic didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The campaign didn’t have a widespread impact, Meta and OpenAI said last week. The fake accounts accumulated more than 40,000 followers across X, Facebook and Instagram, FakeReporter found. But many of those followers may have been bots and didn’t generate a large audience, Meta said.

The operation began just weeks into the war in October, according to Israeli officials and the documents on the effort. Dozens of Israeli tech start-ups received emails and WhatsApp messages that month inviting them to join urgent meetings to become “digital soldiers” for Israel during the war, according to messages viewed by The Times. Some of the emails and messages were sent from Israeli government officials, while others came from tech start-ups and incubators.

The first meeting was held in Tel Aviv in mid-October. It appeared to be an informal gathering where Israelis could volunteer their technical skills to help the country’s war effort, three attendees said. Members of several government ministries also took part, they said.

Participants were told that they could be “warriors for Israel” and that “digital campaigns” could be run on behalf of the country, according to recordings of the meetings.

The Ministry of Diaspora Affairs commissioned a campaign aimed at the United States, the Israeli officials said. A budget of about $2 million was set, according to one message viewed by The Times.

Stoic was hired to run the campaign. On its website and on LinkedIn, Stoic says it was founded in 2017 by a team of political and business strategists and calls itself a political marketing and business intelligence firm. Other companies may have been hired to run additional campaigns, one Israeli official said.

Many of the campaign’s fake accounts on X, Instagram and Facebook posed as fictional American students, concerned citizens and local constituents. The accounts shared articles and statistics that backed Israel’s position in the war.

The operation focused on more than a dozen members of Congress, many of whom are Black and Democrats, according to an analysis by FakeReporter.

Representative Ritchie Torres, a Democrat from New York who is outspoken about his pro-Israel views, was targeted in addition to Mr. Jeffries and Mr. Warnock.

Some of the fake accounts responded to posts by Mr. Torres on X by commenting on antisemitism on college campuses and in major U.S. cities. In response to a Dec. 8 post on X by Mr. Torres about fire safety, one fake account replied, “Hamas is perpetrating the conflict,” referring to the Islamist militant group. The post included a hashtag that said Jews were being persecuted.

On Facebook, the fake accounts posted on Mr. Jeffries’s public page by asking if he had seen a report about the United Nations’ employing members of Hamas in Gaza.

Mr. Torres, Mr. Jeffries and Mr. Warnock didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The campaign also created three fake news sites with names like Non-Agenda and UnFold Magazine, which stole and rewrote material from outlets including CNN and The Wall Street Journal to promote Israel’s stance during the war, according to FakeReporter’s analysis. Fake accounts on Reddit then linked to the articles on the so-called news sites to help promote them.

The effort was sloppy. Profile pictures used in some accounts sometimes didn’t match the fictional personas they cultivated, and the language used in posts was stilted.

In at least two instances, accounts with profile photos of Black men posted about being a “middle-aged Jewish woman.” On 118 posts in which the fake accounts shared pro-Israel articles, the same sentence appeared: “I gotta reevaluate my opinions due to this new information.”

Last week, Meta and OpenAI published reports attributing the influence campaign to Stoic. Meta said it had removed 510 Facebook accounts, 11 Facebook pages, 32 Instagram accounts and one Facebook group tied to the operation. OpenAI said Stoic had created fictional personas and biographies meant to stand in for real people on social media services used in Israel, Canada and the United States to post anti-Islamic messages. Many of the posts remain on X.

X didn’t respond to a request for comment.

On its LinkedIn page, Stoic has promoted its ability to run campaigns backed by A.I. “As we look ahead, it’s clear that A.I.’s role in political campaigns is set for a transformative leap, reshaping the way campaigns are strategized, executed and evaluated,” it wrote.

By Friday, Stoic had removed those posts from LinkedIn.

 

[Anastasis 23479]

10 minutes ago, bolverk said:

The operation is the first documented case of the Israeli government’s organizing a campaign to influence the U.S. government

[Anastasis 23479]

The beat goes on.

Israel strike on UN school that left dozens dead used US munitions, CNN analysis finds

By Abeer Salman, Rob Picheta and Allegra Goodwin, CNN

 5 minute read 

Updated 7:56 AM EDT, Thu June 6, 2024

JerusalemCNN — 

Dozens of people were killed by an overnight Israeli airstrike on a United Nations-run school in central Gaza, authorities said, in an attack that CNN analysis found was conducted with a US-made weapon.

The school, run by the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), was housing displaced people in the Nuseirat refugee camp at the time of the incident, the Gaza government media office said.

At least 45 people were killed in the strike, a spokesperson from Gaza’s Ministry of Health told CNN. Authorities at the nearby Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital said casualties could rise as victims were still being brought to the hospital on Thursday morning.

The Israeli military confirmed it carried out the airstrike, which it said targeted a Hamas compound operating inside the school. CNN cannot independently verify the claims.

In a statement, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it had taken “many measures” to minimize the danger in advance of the strike, including aerial surveillance and the use of “additional precise intelligence.”

A CNN analysis of video from the scene and a review by an explosive weapons expert found that US-made munitions were used in the strike on the school. CNN identified fragments of at least two US-made GBU-39 small diameter bombs (SDB) in video filmed at the scene by a journalist working for CNN.

It marks the second time in two weeks that CNN has been able to verify the use of US-manufactured munitions in deadly Israeli attacks on displaced Palestinians, the first being a deadly IDF strike on a displacement camp in Rafah on May 26.

[Brian Fantana 6689]

I'm gonna need to hear from Andy Ngo or whatever dumbass Twitter source Prong Horn wants to cite before I form an opinion.

[Bullneck 19185]

[Biff Tannen 45694]

Benny Gantz just resigned. 

[Biff Tannen 45694]

15 minutes ago, BeardIP said:

One thing I don't understand about that is why?

He is a centrist/moderate, right? A counterbalance to the hard-liners. But his resignation just made it easier for the hard-liners (aka, the things he is against). So, by resigning without a replacement plan, he makes it worse, right?

 

I think he's just fucking done with it.  Can't be a part of the far right authoritarian nonsense that Bibi has wrought.  Much like the generals and such that abandoned the dotard during his first term.

[Chuckie Finster 22702]

things are going great over here

 

 

 

[Rex Kramer 1343]

Awesome. On a plane to LAX as I type. Just read about how Hamas is betting on civilian deaths.  I wonder if the WSJ is credible as a source. 

[RomaVicta 29946]

16 minutes ago, Rex Kramer said:

Awesome. On a plane to LAX as I type. Just read about how Hamas is betting on civilian deaths.  I wonder if the WSJ is credible as a source. 

Isn't that the same thing Israel is betting on? They're killing a lot of Palestinian civilians in case you haven't been paying attention. They say they're always being really careful but the bodies pile up, neighborhoods are razed, and tens of thousands of people not associated with Hamas face starvation. (We can't call it a famine because the UN lawyers have a specific definition for that. You can see there is famine, but you can't use the word. Just ask the journalists.)

Nothing can redeem the wickedness of Hamas, but they're not hypocrites. 

 

We'll attack civilians. That'll show you!

That should scare everybody into submission.

Fuck the Israeli slaughter campaign in Gaza.

Fuck any shitstain who attacks a Jewish person because they're Jewish.

Not hard to separate the two.

[Rex Kramer 1343]

10 minutes ago, RomaVicta said:

Isn't that the same thing Israel is betting on? They're killing a lot of Palestinian civilians in case you haven't been paying attention. They say they're always being really careful but the bodies pile up, neighborhoods are razed, and tens of thousands of people not associated with Hamas face starvation. (We can't call it a famine because the UN lawyers have a specific definition for that. You can see there is famine, but you can't use the word. Just ask the journalists.)

Nothing can redeem the wickedness of Hamas, but they're not hypocrites. 

 

We'll attack civilians. That'll show you!

That should scare everybody into submission.

Fuck the Israeli slaughter campaign in Gaza.

Fuck any shitstain who attacks a Jewish person because they're Jewish.

Not hard to separate the two.

I posted an article. I think Hamas has very successfully spun the Palestinians as victims for Hamas’ purposes, and because that has always been my strong supposition, and the article clearly bolsters this, I will cut Israel more slack than you. I do not support slaughter of any kind. 

[RomaVicta 29946]

20 minutes ago, Rex Kramer said:

I posted an article. I think Hamas has very successfully spun the Palestinians as victims for Hamas’ purposes, and because that has always been my strong supposition, and the article clearly bolsters this, I will cut Israel more slack than you. I do not support slaughter of any kind. 

Appreciate that, Rex. I don't know that much Hamas' spinning has made it across my plate. We can see the campaign, even through Israel's hostility to journalists, and it's bloody results.

I don't hate Israel. I should make that clear in light of my other posts. This is a terrible policy directed by an amoral politician with bloodlust and fear for his political future. They have a right wing that is evidently as poisonous and vile as what our own has become. I've mentioned my sympathy for Israeli citizens horrified by this campaign and wanting it to stop. Israel is way wrong on this, the position of the Israeli population is disparate.

Hamas is through and through despicable. Their idiotic and hopeless goal of destroying Israel is repulsive. Their acts to make life better for Palestinians are clearly cynical and were done for the aim of staging from Gaza. I'm fine if every single one of them ends up dead.

My profound objection is the use of Palestinian civilians as the medium for this war. They are not actually part of the war. That's why I object to using the word "war" describe Israeli bombing, displacement, and starving of Palestinians. It's a separate campaign as far as I'm concerned.

If I muddied your point of view via my answering post, I apologize.

[Rex Kramer 1343]

12 minutes ago, RomaVicta said:

Appreciate that, Rex. I don't know that much Hamas' spinning has made it across my plate. We can see the campaign, even through Israel's hostility to journalists, and it's bloody results.

I don't hate Israel. I should make that clear in light of my other posts. This is a terrible policy directed by an amoral politician with bloodlust and fear for his political future. They have a right wing that is evidently as poisonous and vile as what our own has become. I've mentioned my sympathy for Israeli citizens horrified by this campaign and wanting it to stop. Israel is way wrong on this, the position of the Israeli population is disparate.

Hamas is through and through despicable. Their idiotic and hopeless goal of destroying Israel is repulsive. Their acts to make life better for Palestinians are clearly cynical and were done for the aim of staging from Gaza. I'm fine if every single one of them ends up dead.

My profound objection is the use of Palestinian civilians as the medium for this war. They are not actually part of the war. That's why I object to using the word "war" describe Israeli bombing, displacement, and starving of Palestinians. It's a separate campaign as far as I'm concerned.

If I muddied your point of view via my answering post, I apologize.

I agree with a lot of what you say, and while we have historically disagreed politically, I really respect you as a poster. 

[RomaVicta 29946]

Very kind. Thank you.

[BrickHorn 18255]

1 hour ago, Rex Kramer said:

I think Hamas has very successfully spun the Palestinians as victims

I know, right? It’s crazy how propaganda can make people think innocent women and children who get blown to pieces are somehow “victims.”

Edited June 11 by BrickHorn

[Biff Tannen 45694]

4 hours ago, RomaVicta said:

My profound objection is the use of Palestinian civilians as the medium for this war. They are not actually part of the war. That's why I object to using the word "war" describe Israeli bombing, displacement, and starving of Palestinians. It's a separate campaign as far as I'm concerned.

This has been my position from the beginning.  That and Netanyahu is a fucking criminal trying to stay out of prison by waging an endless war.

[Brian Fantana 6689]

5 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

That and Netanyahu is a fucking criminal trying to stay out of prison by waging an endless war.

It's weird how not a single one of them will acknowledge this. Actually it's not weird.

[Bullneck 19185]

6 hours ago, Rex Kramer said:

Awesome. On a plane to LAX as I type. Just read about how Hamas is betting on civilian deaths.  I wonder if the WSJ is credible as a source. 

The results are observable.  

[956 Worldwide 34736]

On 6/11/2024 at 10:55 AM, Chuckie Finster said:

things are going great over here

 

 

 

 

[wildcat09 29357]

Those responsible should be thrown in jail for a long time. Let's hope the NYPD actually does their fucking job for once.

[DDD Dad 14344]

19 hours ago, Brian Fantana said:

It's weird how not a single one of them will acknowledge this. Actually it's not weird.

Who exactly is "them"?  There are plenty of us who support Israel while decrying Netanyahu and the way he has been handling this.

[Brian Fantana 6689]

[bolverk 29694]

Mossad has been surveilling, hacking, bugging, smearing, and threatening the ICC's prosecutors (including family members) for the ICC since 2015.

The first article is from today. The other two (IN SPOILERS) are from late May and reveal extensive details of the Guardian's investigation into Bibi's efforts to cover up and avoid accountability for his war crimes. The third article is the most comprehensive.

 

ICC must be allowed to carry out work ‘without intimidation’, say 93 member states
Joint statement of support for international criminal court issued following revelations of Israeli interference

The international criminal court must be allowed to carry out its work “without intimidation”, a group of 93 states has said in a significant public intervention intended to reinforce support for the judicial body.

In a joint statement issued late on Friday, the large group of ICC member states vowed to defend the institution and “preserve its integrity from any political interference and pressure against the court, its officials and those cooperating with it”.

The show of unity for the court and its staff comes in the wake of revelations published by the Guardian about efforts by Israel and its intelligence agencies to undermine, influence and intimidate the court as part of a nine-year campaign of surveillance and espionage. [BELOW IN SPOILERS]

It also follows recent warnings by the office of the ICC’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, that it has been subjected to “several forms of threats” and hostile intelligence activity apparently intended to interfere with and improperly influence the prosecutor’s work.

Last month, Khan announced that he has filed applications for arrest warrants against senior Hamas and Israeli officials for war crimes and crimes against humanity, which he alleged had been committed during Hamas’s 7 October attack and the ensuing war in Gaza.

Khan’s decision to seek arrest warrants against Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and defence minister, Yoav Gallant, is the first time an ICC prosecutor has taken such action against the leaders of a close western ally. The move provoked a fierce response from Israel and its allies in the US.

The statement supporting the ICC was drafted by five of the court’s member states – Belgium, Chile, Jordan, Senegal and Slovenia – and is understood to have been presented to the rest of the court’s state parties last week for their endorsement.

A diplomatic source familiar with the effort said the disclosures about Israeli intelligence operations against the court had been “really eye-opening for a lot of diplomats” and “made some realise that it’s time to put out some sort of statement from the states that belong to the court responding to what has now come to light”.

However, they said the statement was also a response to other recent forms of hostile activity against the ICC, such as a cyber attack last year, and came as the prosecutor is conducting an investigation into senior Russian political and military figures allegedly involved in war crimes and crimes against humanity in Ukraine.

“The court is going after some very powerful people, not just in the Palestine investigation, and it’s time to send a message that the states parties are there to defend it,” the source said.

Longtime ICC observers said it was notable that major western powers such as Germany, France, Canada and the UK had supported the statement, which called on “all states to ensure full cooperation with the court for it to carry out its important mandate”.

They also pointed to the large number of endorsing states – 93 of the ICC’s 124 members – and noted that previous statements rallying around the court had not garnered as much support.

“This is a unique moment of international solidarity, with 93 ICC states parties standing up for global justice and accountability for mass atrocities”, Danya Chaikel, the International Federation for Human Rights’s representative to the ICC, said.

“They are collectively opposing the egregious threats to the court from powerful countries including Israel, the United States and Russia, and strongly rejecting their efforts to manipulate the rule of law for political gains,” she added.

 

The third section of this, ‘Threats and manipulation,’ provides the most details.

Spoiler

Revealed: Israeli spy chief ‘threatened’ ICC prosecutor over war crimes inquiry

The former head of the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, allegedly threatened a chief prosecutor of the international criminal court in a series of secret meetings in which he tried to pressure her into abandoning a war crimes investigation, the Guardian can reveal.

Yossi Cohen’s covert contacts with the ICC’s then prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, took place in the years leading up to her decision to open a formal investigation into alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in occupied Palestinian territories.

That investigation, launched in 2021, culminated last week when Bensouda’s successor, Karim Khan, announced that he was seeking an arrest warrant for the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, over the country’s conduct in its war in Gaza.

The prosecutor’s decision to apply to the ICC’s pre-trial chamber for arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, alongside three Hamas leaders, is an outcome Israel’s military and political establishment has long feared.

Cohen’s personal involvement in the operation against the ICC took place when he was the director of the Mossad. His activities were authorised at a high level and justified on the basis the court posed a threat of prosecutions against military personnel, according to a senior Israeli official.

Another Israeli source briefed on the operation against Bensouda said the Mossad’s objective was to compromise the prosecutor or enlist her as someone who would cooperate with Israel’s demands.

A third source familiar with the operation said Cohen was acting as Netanyahu’s “unofficial messenger”.

Cohen, who was one of Netanyahu’s closest allies at the time and is emerging as a political force in his own right in Israel, personally led the Mossad’s involvement in an almost decade-long campaign by the country to undermine the court.

Four sources confirmed that Bensouda had briefed a small group of senior ICC officials about Cohen’s attempts to sway her, amid concerns about the increasingly persistent and threatening nature of his behaviour.

Three of those sources were familiar with Bensouda’s formal disclosures to the ICC about the matter. They said she revealed Cohen had put pressure on her on several occasions not to proceed with a criminal investigation in the ICC’s Palestine case.

According to accounts shared with ICC officials, he is alleged to have told her: “You should help us and let us take care of you. You don’t want to be getting into things that could compromise your security or that of your family.”

One individual briefed on Cohen’s activities said he had used “despicable tactics” against Bensouda as part of an ultimately unsuccessful effort to intimidate and influence her. They likened his behaviour to “stalking”.

The Mossad also took a keen interest in Bensouda’s family members and obtained transcripts of secret recordings of her husband, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the situation. Israeli officials then attempted to use the material to discredit the prosecutor.

The revelations about Cohen’s operation form part of a forthcoming investigation by the Guardian, the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call, revealing how multiple Israel intelligence agencies ran a covert “war” against the ICC for almost a decade.

Contacted by the Guardian, a spokesperson for Israel’s prime minister’s office said: “The questions forwarded to us are replete with many false and unfounded allegations meant to hurt the state of Israel.” Cohen did not respond to a request for comment. Bensouda declined to comment.

In the Mossad’s efforts to influence Bensouda, Israel received support from an unlikely ally: Joseph Kabila, the former president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, who played a supporting role in the plot.

Revelations about the Mossad’s efforts to influence Bensouda come as the current chief prosecutor, Khan, warned in recent days that he would not hesitate to prosecute “attempts to impede, intimidate or improperly influence” ICC officials.

According to legal experts and former ICC officials, efforts by the Mossad to threaten or put pressure on Bensouda could amount to offences against the administration of justice under article 70 of the Rome statute, the treaty that established the court.

A spokesperson for the ICC would not say whether Khan had reviewed his predecessor’s disclosures about her contacts with Cohen, but said Khan had never met or spoken to the head of the Mossad.

While the spokesperson declined to comment on specific allegations, they said Khan’s office had been subjected to “several forms of threats and communications that could be viewed as attempts to unduly influence its activities”.

Bensouda sparks ire of Israel
Khan’s decision to seek arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant last week marked the first time the court had taken action against leaders of a country closely allied with the US and Europe. Their alleged crimes – which include directing attacks on civilians and using starvation as a method of warfare – relate to the eight-month war in Gaza.

The ICC case, however, dates back to 2015, when Bensouda decided to open a preliminary examination into the situation in Palestine. Short of a full investigation, her inquiry was tasked with making an initial assessment of allegations of crimes by individuals in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Bensouda’s decision sparked the ire of Israel, which feared its citizens could be prosecuted for their involvement in operations in Palestinian territories. Israel had long been open about its opposition to the ICC, refusing to recognise its authority. Israeli ministers intensified their attacks on the court and even vowed to try to dismantle it.

Soon after commencing the preliminary examination, Bensouda and her senior prosecutors began to receive warnings that Israeli intelligence was taking a close interest in their work.

According to two sources, there were even suspicions among senior ICC officials that Israel had cultivated sources within the court’s prosecution division, known as the office of the prosecutor. Another later recalled that although the Mossad “didn’t leave its signature”, it was an assumption the agency was behind some of the activity officials had been made aware of.

Only a small group of senior figures at the ICC, however, were informed that the director of the Mossad had personally approached the chief prosecutor.

A career spy, Cohen enjoys a reputation in Israel’s intelligence community as an effective recruiter of foreign agents. He was a loyal and powerful ally of the prime minister at the time, having been appointed as director of the Mossad by Netanyahu in 2016 after working for several years at his side as his national security adviser.

As the head of the national security council between 2013 and 2016, Cohen oversaw the body that, according to multiple sources, began to coordinate a multiagency effort against the ICC once Bensouda opened the preliminary inquiry in 2015.

Cohen’s first interaction with Bensouda appears to have taken place at the Munich security conference in 2017, when the Mossad director introduced himself to the prosecutor in a brief exchange. After this encounter, Cohen subsequently “ambushed” Bensouda in a bizarre episode in a Manhattan hotel suite, according to multiple sources familiar with the incident.

Bensouda was in New York in 2018 on an official visit, and was meeting Kabila, then the president of the DRC, at his hotel. The pair had met several times before in relation to the ICC’s ongoing investigation into alleged crimes committed in his country.

The meeting, however, appears to have been a setup. At a certain point, after Bensouda’s staff were asked to leave the room, Cohen entered, according to three sources familiar with the meeting. The surprise appearance, they said, caused alarm to Bensouda and a group of ICC officials travelling with her.

Why Kabila helped Cohen is unclear, but ties between the two men were revealed in 2022 by the Israeli publication TheMarker, which reported on a series of secretive trips the Mossad director made to the DRC throughout 2019.

According to the publication, Cohen’s trips, during which he sought Kabila’s advice “on an issue of interest to Israel”, and which were almost certainly approved by Netanyahu, were highly unusual and had astonished senior figures within the intelligence community.

Reporting on the DRC meetings in 2022, the Israeli broadcaster Kan 11 said Cohen’s trips related to an “extremely controversial plan” and cited official sources who described it as “one of Israel’s most sensitive secrets”.

Multiple sources have confirmed to the Guardian the trips were partly related to the ICC operation, and Kabila, who left office in January 2019, played an important supporting role in the Mossad’s plot against Bensouda. Kabila did not respond to a request for comment.

‘Threats and manipulation’
After the surprise meeting with Kabila and Bensouda in New York, Cohen repeatedly phoned the chief prosecutor and sought meetings with her, three sources recalled. According to two people familiar with the situation, at one stage Bensouda asked Cohen how he had obtained her phone number, to which he replied: “Did you forget what I do for a living?”

Initially, the sources explained, the intelligence chief “tried to build a relationship” with the prosecutor and played “good cop” in an attempt to charm her. The initial objective, they said, appeared to have been to enlist Bensouda into cooperating with Israel.

Over time, however, the tone of Cohen’s contact changed and he began to use a range of tactics, including “threats and manipulation”, an individual briefed on the meetings said. This prompted Bensouda to inform a small group of senior ICC officials about his behaviour.

In December 2019, the prosecutor announced that she had grounds to open a full criminal investigation into allegations of war crimes in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. However, she held off launching it, deciding first to request a ruling from the ICC’s pre-trial chamber to confirm the court did indeed have jurisdiction over Palestine.

Multiple sources said it was at this stage, as the judges considered the case, that Cohen escalated his attempts to persuade Bensouda not to pursue a full investigation in the event the judges gave her the green light.

Between late 2019 and early 2021, the sources said, there were at least three encounters between Cohen and Bensouda, all initiated by the spy chief. His behaviour is said to have become increasingly concerning to ICC officials.

A source familiar with Bensouda’s accounts of the final two meetings with Cohen said he had raised questions about her security, and that of her family, in a manner that led her to believe he was threatening her.

On one occasion, Cohen is said to have shown Bensouda copies of photographs of her husband, which were taken covertly when the couple were visiting London. On another, according to sources, Cohen suggested to the prosecutor that a decision to open a full investigation would be detrimental to her career.

Four sources familiar with the situation said it was around the same time that Bensouda and other ICC officials discovered that information was circulating among diplomatic channels relating to her husband, who worked as an international affairs consultant.

Between 2019 and 2020, the Mossad had been actively seeking compromising information on the prosecutor and took an interest in her family members.

The spy agency obtained a cache of material, including transcripts of an apparent sting operation against her husband.

It is unclear who conducted the operation, or precisely what he is alleged to have said in the recordings. One possibility is that he had been targeted by the intelligence agency or by private actors of another country that wanted leverage over the ICC. Another possibility is the information was fabricated.

Once in the possession of Israel, however, the material was used by its diplomats in an unsuccessful attempt to undermine the chief prosecutor. But according to multiple sources, Israel failed to convince its allies of the significance of the material.

Three sources briefed on the information shared by Israel at a diplomatic level described the efforts as part of an unsuccessful “smear campaign” against Bensouda. “They went after Fatou,” one source said, but it had “no impact” on the prosecutor’s work.

The diplomatic efforts were part of a coordinated effort by the governments of Netanyahu and Donald Trump in the US to place public and private pressure on the prosecutor and her staff.

Between 2019 and 2020, in an unprecedented decision, the Trump administration imposed visa restrictions and sanctions on the chief prosecutor. The move was in retaliation to Bensouda’s pursuit of a separate investigation into war crimes in Afghanistan, allegedly committed by the Taliban and both Afghan and US military personnel.

However, Mike Pompeo, then US secretary of state, linked the sanctions package to the Palestine case. “It’s clear the ICC is only putting Israel in [its] crosshairs for nakedly political purposes,” he said.

Months later, he accused Bensouda, without citing any evidence, of having “engaged in corrupt acts for her personal benefit”.

The US sanctions were rescinded after President Joe Biden entered the White House.

In February 2021, the ICC’s pre-trial chamber issued a ruling confirming the ICC had jurisdiction in occupied Palestinian territories. The following month, Bensouda announced the opening of the criminal investigation.

“In the end, our central concern must be for the victims of crimes, both Palestinian and Israeli, arising from the long cycle of violence and insecurity that has caused deep suffering and despair on all sides,” she said at the time.

Bensouda completed her nine-year term at the ICC three months later, leaving it to her successor, Khan, to take up the investigation. It was only after the Hamas attacks on Israel on 7 October and the ensuing war on Gaza that the ICC’s investigation gained renewed urgency, culminating in last week’s request for arrest warrants.

It was the conclusion Israel’s political, military and intelligence establishment had feared. “The fact they chose the head of Mossad to be the prime minister’s unofficial messenger to [Bensouda] was to intimidate, by definition,” said a source briefed on Cohen’s operation. “It failed.”

 

This is the meat of the Gaurdian's investigation. It's very long but provides all the details. Their efforts were (are) systematic and widespread, and of course, Trump was happy to get involved when he was president.

Spoiler

Spying, hacking and intimidation: Israel’s nine-year ‘war’ on the ICC exposed

When the chief prosecutor of the international criminal court (ICC) announced he was seeking arrest warrants against Israeli and Hamas leaders, he issued a cryptic warning: “I insist that all attempts to impede, intimidate or improperly influence the officials of this court must cease immediately.”

Karim Khan did not provide specific details of attempts to interfere in the ICC’s work, but he noted a clause in the court’s foundational treaty that made any such interference a criminal offence. If the conduct continued, he added, “my office will not hesitate to act”.

The prosecutor did not say who had attempted to intervene in the administration of justice, or how exactly they had done so.

Now, an investigation by the Guardian and the Israeli-based magazines +972 and Local Call can reveal how Israel has run an almost decade-long secret “war” against the court. The country deployed its intelligence agencies to surveil, hack, pressure, smear and allegedly threaten senior ICC staff in an effort to derail the court’s inquiries.

Israeli intelligence captured the communications of numerous ICC officials, including Khan and his predecessor as prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, intercepting phone calls, messages, emails and documents.

The surveillance was ongoing in recent months, providing Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, with advance knowledge of the prosecutor’s intentions. A recent intercepted communication suggested that Khan wanted to issue arrest warrants against Israelis but was under “tremendous pressure from the United States”, according to a source familiar with its contents.

Bensouda, who as chief prosecutor opened the ICC’s investigation in 2021, paving the way for last week’s announcement, was also spied on and allegedly threatened.

Netanyahu has taken a close interest in the intelligence operations against the ICC, and was described by one intelligence source as being “obsessed” with intercepts about the case. Overseen by his national security advisers, the efforts involved the domestic spy agency, the Shin Bet, as well as the military’s intelligence directorate, Aman, and cyber-intelligence division, Unit 8200. Intelligence gleaned from intercepts was, sources said, disseminated to government ministries of justice, foreign affairs and strategic affairs.

A covert operation against Bensouda, revealed on Tuesday by the Guardian, was run personally by Netanyahu’s close ally Yossi Cohen, who was at the time the director of Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad. At one stage, the spy chief even enlisted the help of the then president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Joseph Kabila.

Details of Israel’s nine-year campaign to thwart the ICC’s inquiry have been uncovered by the Guardian, an Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and Local Call, a Hebrew-language outlet.

The joint investigation draws on interviews with more than two dozen current and former Israeli intelligence officers and government officials, senior ICC figures, diplomats and lawyers familiar with the ICC case and Israel’s efforts to undermine it.

Contacted by the Guardian, a spokesperson for the ICC said it was aware of “proactive intelligence-gathering activities being undertaken by a number of national agencies hostile towards the court”. They said the ICC was continually implementing countermeasures against such activity, and that “none of the recent attacks against it by national intelligence agencies” had penetrated the court’s core evidence holdings, which had remained secure.

A spokesperson for Israel’s prime minister’s office said: “The questions forwarded to us are replete with many false and unfounded allegations meant to hurt the state of Israel.” A military spokesperson added: “The IDF [Israel Defense Forces] did not and does not conduct surveillance or other intelligence operations against the ICC.”

Since it was established in 2002, the ICC has served as a permanent court of last resort for the prosecution of individuals accused of some of the world’s worst atrocities. It has charged the former Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, the late Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi and most recently, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.

Khan’s decision to seek warrants against Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, along with Hamas leaders implicated in the 7 October attack, marks the first time an ICC prosecutor has sought arrest warrants against the leader of a close western ally.

The allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity that Khan has levelled against Netanyahu and Gallant all relate to Israel’s eight-month war in Gaza, which according to the territory’s health authority has killed more than 35,000 people.

But the ICC case has been a decade in the making, inching forward amid rising alarm among Israeli officials at the possibility of arrest warrants, which would prevent those accused from travelling to any of the court’s 124 member states for fear of arrest.

It is this spectre of prosecutions in The Hague that one former Israeli intelligence official said had led the “entire military and political establishment” to regard the counteroffensive against the ICC “as a war that had to be waged, and one that Israel needed to be defended against. It was described in military terms.”

That “war” commenced in January 2015, when it was confirmed that Palestine would join the court after it was recognised as a state by the UN general assembly. Its accession was condemned by Israeli officials as a form of “diplomatic terrorism”.

One former defence official familiar with Israel’s counter-ICC effort said joining the court had been “perceived as the crossing of a red line” and “perhaps the most aggressive” diplomatic move taken by the Palestinian Authority, which governs the West Bank. “To be recognised as a state in the UN is nice,” they added. “But the ICC is a mechanism with teeth.”

A hand-delivered threat
For Fatou Bensouda, a respected Gambian lawyer who was elected the ICC’s chief prosecutor in 2012, the accession of Palestine to the court brought with it a momentous decision. Under the Rome statute, the treaty that established the court, the ICC can exercise its jurisdiction only over crimes within member states or by nationals of those states.

Israel, like the US, Russia and China, is not a member. After Palestine’s acceptance as an ICC member, any alleged war crimes – committed by those of any nationality – in occupied Palestinian territories now fell under Bensouda’s jurisdiction.

On 16 January 2015, within weeks of Palestine joining, Bensouda opened a preliminary examination into what in the legalese of the court was called “the situation in Palestine”. The following month, two men who had managed to obtain the prosecutor’s private address turned up at her home in The Hague.

Sources familiar with the incident said the men declined to identify themselves when they arrived, but said they wanted to hand-deliver a letter to Bensouda on behalf of an unknown German woman who wanted to thank her. The envelope contained hundreds of dollars in cash and a note with an Israeli phone number.

Sources with knowledge of an ICC review into the incident said that while it was not possible to identify the men, or fully establish their motives, it was concluded that Israel was likely to be signalling to the prosecutor that it knew where she lived. The ICC reported the incident to Dutch authorities and put in place additional security, installing CCTV cameras at her home.

The ICC’s preliminary inquiry in the Palestinian territories was one of several such fact-finding exercises the court was undertaking at the time, as a precursor to a possible full investigation. Bensouda’s caseload also included nine full investigations, including into events in DRC, Kenya and the Darfur region of Sudan.

Officials in the prosecutor’s office believed the court was vulnerable to espionage activity and introduced countersurveillance measures to protect their confidential inquiries.

In Israel, the prime minister’s national security council (NSC) had mobilised a response involving its intelligence agencies. Netanyahu and some of the generals and spy chiefs who authorised the operation had a personal stake in its outcome.

Unlike the international court of justice (ICJ), a UN body that deals with the legal responsibility of nation states, the ICC is a criminal court that prosecutes individuals, targeting those deemed most responsible for atrocities.

Multiple Israeli sources said the leadership of the IDF wanted military intelligence to join the effort, which was being led by other spy agencies, to ensure senior officers could be protected from charges. “We were told that senior officers are afraid to accept positions in the West Bank because they are afraid of being prosecuted in The Hague,” one source recalled.

Two intelligence officials involved in procuring intercepts about the ICC said the prime minister’s office took a keen interest in their work. Netanyahu’s office, one said, would send “areas of interests” and “instructions” in relation to the monitoring of court officials. Another described the prime minister as “obsessed” with intercepts shedding light on the activities of the ICC.

Hacked emails and monitored calls
Five sources familiar with Israel’s intelligence activities said it routinely spied on the phone calls made by Bensouda and her staff with Palestinians. Blocked by Israel from accessing Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, the ICC was forced to conduct much of its research by telephone, which made it more susceptible to surveillance.

Thanks to their comprehensive access to Palestinian telecoms infrastructure, the sources said, intelligence operatives could capture the calls without installing spyware on the ICC official’s devices.

“If Fatou Bensouda spoke to any person in the West Bank or Gaza, then that phone call would enter [intercept] systems,” one source said. Another said there was no hesitation internally over spying on the prosecutor, adding: “With Bensouda, she’s black and African, so who cares?”

The surveillance system did not capture calls between ICC officials and anyone outside Palestine. However, multiple sources said the system required the active selection of the overseas phone numbers of ICC officials whose calls Israeli intelligence agencies decided to listen to.

According to one Israeli source, a large whiteboard in an Israeli intelligence department contained the names of about 60 people under surveillance – half of them Palestinians and half from other countries, including UN officials and ICC personnel.

In The Hague, Bensouda and her senior staff were alerted by security advisers and via diplomatic channels that Israel was monitoring their work. A former senior ICC official recalled: “We were made aware they were trying to get information on where we were with the preliminary examination.”

Officials also became aware of specific threats against a prominent Palestinian NGO, Al-Haq, which was one of several Palestinian human rights groups that frequently submitted information to the ICC inquiry, often in lengthy documents detailing incidents it wanted the prosecutor to consider. The Palestinian Authority submitted similar dossiers.

Such documents often contain sensitive information such as testimony from potential witnesses. Al-Haq’s submissions are also understood to have linked specific allegations of Rome statute crimes to senior officials, including chiefs of the IDF, directors of the Shin Bet, and defence ministers such as Benny Gantz.

Years later, after the ICC had opened a full investigation into the Palestine case, Gantz designated Al-Haq and five other Palestinian rights groups as “terrorist organisations”, a label that was rejected by multiple European states and later found by the CIA to be unsupported by evidence. The organisations said the designations were a “targeted assault” against those most actively engaging with the ICC.

According to multiple current and former intelligence officials, military cyber-offensive teams and the Shin Bet both systematically monitored the employees of Palestinian NGOs and the Palestinian Authority who were engaging with the ICC. Two intelligence sources described how Israeli operatives hacked into the emails of Al-Haq and other groups communicating with Bensouda’s office.

One of the sources said the Shin Bet even installed Pegasus spyware, developed by the private-sector NSO Group, on the phones of multiple Palestinian NGO employees, as well as two senior Palestinian Authority officials.

Keeping tabs on the Palestinian submissions to the ICC’s inquiry was viewed as part of the Shin Bet’s mandate, but some army officials were concerned that spying on a foreign civilian entity crossed a line, as it had little to do with military operations.

“It has nothing to do with Hamas, it has nothing to do with stability in the West Bank,” one military source said of the ICC surveillance. Another added: “We used our resources to spy on Fatou Bensouda – this isn’t something legitimate to do as military intelligence.”

Secret meetings with the ICC
Legitimate or otherwise, the surveillance of the ICC and Palestinians making the case for prosecutions against Israelis provided the Israeli government with an advantage in a secret back channel it had opened with the prosecutor’s office.

Israel’s meetings with the ICC were highly sensitive: if made public, they had the potential to undermine the government’s official position that it did not recognise the court’s authority.

According to six sources familiar with the meetings, they consisted of a delegation of top government lawyers and diplomats who travelled to The Hague. Two of the sources said the meetings were authorised by Netanyahu.

The Israeli delegation was drawn from the justice ministry, foreign ministry and the military advocate general’s office. The meetings took place between 2017 and 2019, and were led by the prominent Israeli lawyer and diplomat Tal Becker.

“In the beginning it was tense,” recalled a former ICC official. “We would get into details of specific incidents. We’d say: ‘We’re receiving allegations about these attacks, these killings,’ and they would provide us with information.”

A person with direct knowledge of Israel’s preparation for the back-channel meetings said officials in the justice ministry were furnished with intelligence that had been gleaned from Israeli surveillance intercepts before delegations arrived at The Hague. “The lawyers who dealt with the issue at the justice ministry had a big thirst for intelligence information,” they said.

For the Israelis, the back-channel meetings, while sensitive, presented a unique opportunity to directly present legal arguments challenging the prosecutor’s jurisdiction over the Palestinian territories.

They also sought to convince the prosecutor that, despite the Israeli military’s highly questionable record of investigating wrongdoing in its ranks, it had robust procedures for holding its armed forces to account.

This was a critical issue for Israel. A core ICC principle, known as complementarity, prevents the prosecutor from investigating or trying individuals if they are the subject of credible state-level investigations or criminal proceedings.

Israeli surveillance operatives were asked to find out which specific incidents might form part of a future ICC prosecution, multiple sources said, in order to enable Israeli investigative bodies to “open investigations retroactively” in the same cases.

“If materials were transferred to the ICC, we had to understand exactly what they were, to ensure that the IDF investigated them independently and sufficiently so that they could claim complementarity,” one source explained.

Israel’s back-channel meetings with the ICC ended in December 2019, when Bensouda, announcing the end of her preliminary examination, said she believed there was a “reasonable basis” to conclude that Israel and Palestinian armed groups had both committed war crimes in the occupied territories.

It was a significant setback for Israel’s leaders, although it could have been worse. In a move that some in the government regarded as a partial vindication of Israel’s lobbying efforts, Bensouda stopped short of launching a formal investigation.

Instead, she announced she would ask a panel of ICC judges to rule on the contentious question of the court’s jurisdiction over the Palestinian territories, due to “unique and highly contested legal and factual issues”.

Yet Bensouda had made clear she was minded to open a full investigation if the judges gave her the green light. It was against this backdrop that Israel ramped up its campaign against the ICC and turned to its top spy chief to turn up the heat on Bensouda personally.

Personal threats and a ‘smear campaign’
Between late 2019 and early 2021, as the pre-trial chamber considered the jurisdictional questions, the director of the Mossad, Yossi Cohen, intensified his efforts to persuade Bensouda not to proceed with the investigation.

Cohen’s contacts with Bensouda – which were described to the Guardian by four people familiar with the prosecutor’s contemporaneous accounts of the interactions, as well as sources briefed on the Mossad operation – had begun several years earlier.

In one of the earliest encounters, Cohen surprised Bensouda when he made an unexpected appearance at an official meeting the prosecutor was holding with the then DRC president, Joseph Kabila, in a New York hotel suite.

Sources familiar with the meeting said that after Bensouda’s staff were asked to leave the room, the director of the Mossad suddenly appeared from behind a door in a carefully choreographed “ambush”.

After the incident in New York, Cohen persisted in contacting the prosecutor, turning up unannounced and subjecting her to unwanted calls. While initially amicable, the sources said, Cohen’s behaviour became increasingly threatening and intimidating.

A close ally of Netanyahu at the time, Cohen was a veteran Mossad spymaster and had gained a reputation within the service as a skilled recruiter of agents with experience cultivating high-level officials in foreign governments.

Accounts of his secret meetings with Bensouda paint a picture in which he sought to “build a relationship” with the prosecutor as he attempted to dissuade her from pursuing an investigation that, if it went ahead, could embroil senior Israeli officials.

Three sources briefed on Cohen’s activities said they understood the spy chief had tried to recruit Bensouda into complying with Israel’s demands during the period in which she was waiting for a ruling from the pre-trial chamber.

They said he became more threatening after he began to realise the prosecutor would not be persuaded to abandon the investigation. At one stage, Cohen is said to have made comments about Bensouda’s security and thinly veiled threats about the consequences for her career if she proceeded. Contacted by the Guardian, Cohen and Kabila did not respond to requests for comment. Bensouda declined to comment.

When she was prosecutor, Bensouda formally disclosed her encounters with Cohen to a small group within the ICC, with the intention of putting on record her belief that she had been “personally threatened”, sources familiar with the disclosures said.

This was not the only way Israel sought to place pressure on the prosecutor. At around the same time, ICC officials discovered details of what sources described as a diplomatic “smear campaign”, relating in part to a close family member.

According to multiple sources, the Mossad had obtained a cache of material including transcripts of an apparent sting operation against Bensouda’s husband. The origins of the material – and whether it was genuine – remain unclear.

However, elements of the information were circulated by Israel among western diplomatic officials, sources said, in a failed attempt to discredit the chief prosecutor. A person briefed on the campaign said it gained little traction among diplomats and amounted to a desperate attempt to “besmirch” Bensouda’s reputation.

Trump’s campaign against the ICC
In March 2020, three months after Bensouda referred the Palestine case to the pre-trial chamber, an Israeli government delegation reportedly held discussions in Washington with senior US officials about “a joint Israeli-American struggle” against the ICC.

One Israeli intelligence official said they regarded Donald Trump’s administration as more cooperative than that of his Democratic predecessor. The Israelis felt sufficiently comfortable to ask for information from US intelligence about Bensouda, a request the source said would have been “impossible” during Barack Obama’s tenure.

Days before the meetings in Washington, Bensouda had received authorisation from the ICC’s judges to pursue a separate investigation into war crimes in Afghanistan committed by the Taliban and both Afghan and US military personnel.

Fearing US armed forces would be prosecuted, the Trump administration was engaged in its own aggressive campaign against the ICC, culminating in the summer of 2020 with the imposition of US economic sanctions on Bensouda and one of her top officials.

Among ICC officials, the US-led financial and visa restrictions on court personnel were believed to relate as much to the Palestine investigation as to the Afghanistan case. Two former ICC officials said senior Israeli officials had expressly indicated to them that Israel and the US were working together.

At a press conference in June that year, senior Trump administration figures signalled their intention to impose sanctions on ICC officials, announcing they had received unspecified information about “financial corruption and malfeasance at the highest levels of the office of the prosecutor”.

As well as referring to the Afghanistan case, Mike Pompeo, Trump’s secretary of state, linked the US measures to the Palestine case. “It’s clear the ICC is only putting Israel in [its] crosshairs for nakedly political purposes,” he said. Months later, Pompeo accused Bensouda of having “engaged in corrupt acts for her personal benefit”.

The US has never publicly provided any information to substantiate that charge, and Joe Biden lifted the sanctions months after he entered the White House.

But at the time Bensouda faced increasing pressure from an apparently concerted effort behind the scenes by the two powerful allies. As a Gambian national, she did not enjoy the political protection that other ICC colleagues from western countries had by virtue of their citizenship. A former ICC source said this left her “vulnerable and isolated”.

Cohen’s activities, sources said, were particularly concerning for the prosecutor and led her to fear for her personal safety. When the pre-trial chamber finally confirmed the ICC had jurisdiction in Palestine in February 2021, some at the ICC even believed Bensouda should leave the final decision to open a full investigation to her successor.

On 3 March, however, months before the end of her nine-year term, Bensouda announced a full investigation in the Palestine case, setting in motion a process that could lead to criminal charges, though she cautioned the next phase could take time.

“Any investigation undertaken by the office will be conducted independently, impartially and objectively, without fear or favour,” she said. “To both Palestinian and Israeli victims and affected communities, we urge patience.”

Khan announces arrest warrants
When Khan took the helm at the ICC prosecutor’s office in June 2021, he inherited an investigation he later said “lies on the San Andreas fault of international politics and strategic interests”.

As he took office, other investigations – including on events in the Philippines, DRC, Afghanistan and Bangladesh – competed for his attention, and in March 2022, days after Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, he opened a high-profile investigation into alleged Russian war crimes.

Initially, the politically sensitive Palestine inquiry was not treated as a priority by the British prosecutor’s team, sources familiar with the case said. One said it was in effect “on the shelf” – but Khan’s office disputes this and says it established a dedicated investigative team to take the inquiry forward.

In Israel, the government’s top lawyers regarded Khan – who had previously defended warlords such as the former Liberian president Charles Taylor – as a more cautious prosecutor than Bensouda. One former senior Israeli official said there was “lots of respect” for Khan, unlike for his predecessor. His appointment to the court was viewed as a “reason for optimism”, they said, but they added that the 7 October attack “changed that reality”.

The Hamas assault on southern Israel, in which Palestinian militants killed nearly 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped about 250 people, clearly involved brazen war crimes. So, too, in the view of many legal experts, has Israel’s subsequent onslaught on Gaza, which is estimated to have killed more than 35,000 people and brought the territory to the brink of famine through Israel’s obstruction of humanitarian aid.

By the end of the third week of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, Khan was on the ground at the Rafah border crossing. He subsequently made visits to the West Bank and southern Israel, where he was invited to meet survivors of the 7 October attack and the relatives of people who had been killed.

In February 2024, Khan issued a strongly worded statement that Netanyahu’s legal advisers interpreted as an ominous sign. In the post on X, he in effect warned Israel against launching an assault on Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, where more than 1 million displaced people were sheltering at the time.

“I am deeply concerned by the reported bombardment and potential ground incursion by Israeli forces in Rafah,” he wrote. “Those who do not comply with the law should not complain later when my office takes action.”

The comments stirred alarm within the Israeli government as they appeared to deviate from his previous statements about the war, which officials had viewed as reassuringly cautious. “That tweet surprised us a lot,” a senior official said.

Concerns in Israel over Khan’s intentions escalated last month when the government briefed the media that it believed the prosecutor was contemplating arrest warrants against Netanyahu and other senior officials such as Yoav Gallant.

Israeli intelligence had intercepted emails, attachments and text messages from Khan and other officials in his office. “The subject of the ICC climbed the ladder of priorities for Israeli intelligence,” one intelligence source said.

It was via intercepted communications that Israel established that Khan was at one stage considering entering Gaza through Egypt and wanted urgent assistance doing so “without Israel’s permission”.

Another Israeli intelligence assessment, circulated widely in the intelligence community, drew on surveillance of a call between two Palestinian politicians. One of them said Khan had indicated that a request for arrest warrants of Israeli leaders could be imminent, but warned he was “under tremendous pressure from the United States”.

It was against this backdrop that Netanyahu made a series of public statements warning a request for arrest warrants could be imminent. He called on “the leaders of the free world to stand firmly against the ICC” and “use all the means at their disposal to stop this dangerous move”.

He added: “Branding Israel’s leaders and soldiers as war criminals will pour jet fuel on the fires of antisemitism.” In Washington, a group of senior US Republican senators had already sent a threatening letter to Khan with a clear warning: “Target Israel and we will target you.”

The ICC, meanwhile, has strengthened its security with regular sweeps of the prosecutor’s offices, security checks on devices, phone-free areas, weekly threat assessments and the introduction of specialist equipment. An ICC spokesperson said Khan’s office had been subjected to “several forms of threats and communications that could be viewed as attempts to unduly influence its activities”.

Khan recently disclosed in an interview with CNN that some elected leaders had been “very blunt” with him as he prepared to issue arrest warrants. “‘This court is built for Africa and for thugs like Putin,’ is was what a senior leader told me.”

Despite the pressure, Khan, like his predecessor in the prosecutor’s office, chose to press ahead. Last week, Khan announced he was seeking arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant alongside three Hamas leaders for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

He said Israel’s prime minister and defence minister stood accused of responsibility for extermination, starvation, the denial of humanitarian relief supplies and deliberate targeting of civilians.

Standing at a lectern with two of his top prosecutors – one American, the other British – at his side, Khan said he had repeatedly told Israel to take urgent action to comply with humanitarian law.

“I specifically underlined that starvation as a method of war and the denial of humanitarian relief constitute Rome statute offences. I could not have been clearer,” he said. “As I also repeatedly underlined in my public statements, those who do not comply with the law should not complain later when my office takes action. That day has come.”

 

[PRONG HORN 3151]

 

 

 

Ha LOL

 

 

[Anastasis 23479]

17 hours ago, bolverk said:

Mossad has been surveilling, hacking, bugging, smearing, and threatening the ICC's prosecutors (including family members) for the ICC since 2015.

The first article is from today. The other two (IN SPOILERS) are from late May and reveal extensive details of the Guardian's investigation into Bibi's efforts to cover up and avoid accountability for his war crimes. The third article is the most comprehensive.

 

ICC must be allowed to carry out work ‘without intimidation’, say 93 member states
Joint statement of support for international criminal court issued following revelations of Israeli interference

The international criminal court must be allowed to carry out its work “without intimidation”, a group of 93 states has said in a significant public intervention intended to reinforce support for the judicial body.

In a joint statement issued late on Friday, the large group of ICC member states vowed to defend the institution and “preserve its integrity from any political interference and pressure against the court, its officials and those cooperating with it”.

The show of unity for the court and its staff comes in the wake of revelations published by the Guardian about efforts by Israel and its intelligence agencies to undermine, influence and intimidate the court as part of a nine-year campaign of surveillance and espionage. [BELOW IN SPOILERS]

It also follows recent warnings by the office of the ICC’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, that it has been subjected to “several forms of threats” and hostile intelligence activity apparently intended to interfere with and improperly influence the prosecutor’s work.

Last month, Khan announced that he has filed applications for arrest warrants against senior Hamas and Israeli officials for war crimes and crimes against humanity, which he alleged had been committed during Hamas’s 7 October attack and the ensuing war in Gaza.

Khan’s decision to seek arrest warrants against Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and defence minister, Yoav Gallant, is the first time an ICC prosecutor has taken such action against the leaders of a close western ally. The move provoked a fierce response from Israel and its allies in the US.

The statement supporting the ICC was drafted by five of the court’s member states – Belgium, Chile, Jordan, Senegal and Slovenia – and is understood to have been presented to the rest of the court’s state parties last week for their endorsement.

A diplomatic source familiar with the effort said the disclosures about Israeli intelligence operations against the court had been “really eye-opening for a lot of diplomats” and “made some realise that it’s time to put out some sort of statement from the states that belong to the court responding to what has now come to light”.

However, they said the statement was also a response to other recent forms of hostile activity against the ICC, such as a cyber attack last year, and came as the prosecutor is conducting an investigation into senior Russian political and military figures allegedly involved in war crimes and crimes against humanity in Ukraine.

“The court is going after some very powerful people, not just in the Palestine investigation, and it’s time to send a message that the states parties are there to defend it,” the source said.

Longtime ICC observers said it was notable that major western powers such as Germany, France, Canada and the UK had supported the statement, which called on “all states to ensure full cooperation with the court for it to carry out its important mandate”.

They also pointed to the large number of endorsing states – 93 of the ICC’s 124 members – and noted that previous statements rallying around the court had not garnered as much support.

“This is a unique moment of international solidarity, with 93 ICC states parties standing up for global justice and accountability for mass atrocities”, Danya Chaikel, the International Federation for Human Rights’s representative to the ICC, said.

“They are collectively opposing the egregious threats to the court from powerful countries including Israel, the United States and Russia, and strongly rejecting their efforts to manipulate the rule of law for political gains,” she added.

 

The third section of this, ‘Threats and manipulation,’ provides the most details.

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Revealed: Israeli spy chief ‘threatened’ ICC prosecutor over war crimes inquiry

The former head of the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, allegedly threatened a chief prosecutor of the international criminal court in a series of secret meetings in which he tried to pressure her into abandoning a war crimes investigation, the Guardian can reveal.

Yossi Cohen’s covert contacts with the ICC’s then prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, took place in the years leading up to her decision to open a formal investigation into alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in occupied Palestinian territories.

That investigation, launched in 2021, culminated last week when Bensouda’s successor, Karim Khan, announced that he was seeking an arrest warrant for the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, over the country’s conduct in its war in Gaza.

The prosecutor’s decision to apply to the ICC’s pre-trial chamber for arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, alongside three Hamas leaders, is an outcome Israel’s military and political establishment has long feared.

Cohen’s personal involvement in the operation against the ICC took place when he was the director of the Mossad. His activities were authorised at a high level and justified on the basis the court posed a threat of prosecutions against military personnel, according to a senior Israeli official.

Another Israeli source briefed on the operation against Bensouda said the Mossad’s objective was to compromise the prosecutor or enlist her as someone who would cooperate with Israel’s demands.

A third source familiar with the operation said Cohen was acting as Netanyahu’s “unofficial messenger”.

Cohen, who was one of Netanyahu’s closest allies at the time and is emerging as a political force in his own right in Israel, personally led the Mossad’s involvement in an almost decade-long campaign by the country to undermine the court.

Four sources confirmed that Bensouda had briefed a small group of senior ICC officials about Cohen’s attempts to sway her, amid concerns about the increasingly persistent and threatening nature of his behaviour.

Three of those sources were familiar with Bensouda’s formal disclosures to the ICC about the matter. They said she revealed Cohen had put pressure on her on several occasions not to proceed with a criminal investigation in the ICC’s Palestine case.

According to accounts shared with ICC officials, he is alleged to have told her: “You should help us and let us take care of you. You don’t want to be getting into things that could compromise your security or that of your family.”

One individual briefed on Cohen’s activities said he had used “despicable tactics” against Bensouda as part of an ultimately unsuccessful effort to intimidate and influence her. They likened his behaviour to “stalking”.

The Mossad also took a keen interest in Bensouda’s family members and obtained transcripts of secret recordings of her husband, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the situation. Israeli officials then attempted to use the material to discredit the prosecutor.

The revelations about Cohen’s operation form part of a forthcoming investigation by the Guardian, the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call, revealing how multiple Israel intelligence agencies ran a covert “war” against the ICC for almost a decade.

Contacted by the Guardian, a spokesperson for Israel’s prime minister’s office said: “The questions forwarded to us are replete with many false and unfounded allegations meant to hurt the state of Israel.” Cohen did not respond to a request for comment. Bensouda declined to comment.

In the Mossad’s efforts to influence Bensouda, Israel received support from an unlikely ally: Joseph Kabila, the former president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, who played a supporting role in the plot.

Revelations about the Mossad’s efforts to influence Bensouda come as the current chief prosecutor, Khan, warned in recent days that he would not hesitate to prosecute “attempts to impede, intimidate or improperly influence” ICC officials.

According to legal experts and former ICC officials, efforts by the Mossad to threaten or put pressure on Bensouda could amount to offences against the administration of justice under article 70 of the Rome statute, the treaty that established the court.

A spokesperson for the ICC would not say whether Khan had reviewed his predecessor’s disclosures about her contacts with Cohen, but said Khan had never met or spoken to the head of the Mossad.

While the spokesperson declined to comment on specific allegations, they said Khan’s office had been subjected to “several forms of threats and communications that could be viewed as attempts to unduly influence its activities”.

Bensouda sparks ire of Israel
Khan’s decision to seek arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant last week marked the first time the court had taken action against leaders of a country closely allied with the US and Europe. Their alleged crimes – which include directing attacks on civilians and using starvation as a method of warfare – relate to the eight-month war in Gaza.

The ICC case, however, dates back to 2015, when Bensouda decided to open a preliminary examination into the situation in Palestine. Short of a full investigation, her inquiry was tasked with making an initial assessment of allegations of crimes by individuals in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Bensouda’s decision sparked the ire of Israel, which feared its citizens could be prosecuted for their involvement in operations in Palestinian territories. Israel had long been open about its opposition to the ICC, refusing to recognise its authority. Israeli ministers intensified their attacks on the court and even vowed to try to dismantle it.

Soon after commencing the preliminary examination, Bensouda and her senior prosecutors began to receive warnings that Israeli intelligence was taking a close interest in their work.

According to two sources, there were even suspicions among senior ICC officials that Israel had cultivated sources within the court’s prosecution division, known as the office of the prosecutor. Another later recalled that although the Mossad “didn’t leave its signature”, it was an assumption the agency was behind some of the activity officials had been made aware of.

Only a small group of senior figures at the ICC, however, were informed that the director of the Mossad had personally approached the chief prosecutor.

A career spy, Cohen enjoys a reputation in Israel’s intelligence community as an effective recruiter of foreign agents. He was a loyal and powerful ally of the prime minister at the time, having been appointed as director of the Mossad by Netanyahu in 2016 after working for several years at his side as his national security adviser.

As the head of the national security council between 2013 and 2016, Cohen oversaw the body that, according to multiple sources, began to coordinate a multiagency effort against the ICC once Bensouda opened the preliminary inquiry in 2015.

Cohen’s first interaction with Bensouda appears to have taken place at the Munich security conference in 2017, when the Mossad director introduced himself to the prosecutor in a brief exchange. After this encounter, Cohen subsequently “ambushed” Bensouda in a bizarre episode in a Manhattan hotel suite, according to multiple sources familiar with the incident.

Bensouda was in New York in 2018 on an official visit, and was meeting Kabila, then the president of the DRC, at his hotel. The pair had met several times before in relation to the ICC’s ongoing investigation into alleged crimes committed in his country.

The meeting, however, appears to have been a setup. At a certain point, after Bensouda’s staff were asked to leave the room, Cohen entered, according to three sources familiar with the meeting. The surprise appearance, they said, caused alarm to Bensouda and a group of ICC officials travelling with her.

Why Kabila helped Cohen is unclear, but ties between the two men were revealed in 2022 by the Israeli publication TheMarker, which reported on a series of secretive trips the Mossad director made to the DRC throughout 2019.

According to the publication, Cohen’s trips, during which he sought Kabila’s advice “on an issue of interest to Israel”, and which were almost certainly approved by Netanyahu, were highly unusual and had astonished senior figures within the intelligence community.

Reporting on the DRC meetings in 2022, the Israeli broadcaster Kan 11 said Cohen’s trips related to an “extremely controversial plan” and cited official sources who described it as “one of Israel’s most sensitive secrets”.

Multiple sources have confirmed to the Guardian the trips were partly related to the ICC operation, and Kabila, who left office in January 2019, played an important supporting role in the Mossad’s plot against Bensouda. Kabila did not respond to a request for comment.

‘Threats and manipulation’
After the surprise meeting with Kabila and Bensouda in New York, Cohen repeatedly phoned the chief prosecutor and sought meetings with her, three sources recalled. According to two people familiar with the situation, at one stage Bensouda asked Cohen how he had obtained her phone number, to which he replied: “Did you forget what I do for a living?”

Initially, the sources explained, the intelligence chief “tried to build a relationship” with the prosecutor and played “good cop” in an attempt to charm her. The initial objective, they said, appeared to have been to enlist Bensouda into cooperating with Israel.

Over time, however, the tone of Cohen’s contact changed and he began to use a range of tactics, including “threats and manipulation”, an individual briefed on the meetings said. This prompted Bensouda to inform a small group of senior ICC officials about his behaviour.

In December 2019, the prosecutor announced that she had grounds to open a full criminal investigation into allegations of war crimes in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. However, she held off launching it, deciding first to request a ruling from the ICC’s pre-trial chamber to confirm the court did indeed have jurisdiction over Palestine.

Multiple sources said it was at this stage, as the judges considered the case, that Cohen escalated his attempts to persuade Bensouda not to pursue a full investigation in the event the judges gave her the green light.

Between late 2019 and early 2021, the sources said, there were at least three encounters between Cohen and Bensouda, all initiated by the spy chief. His behaviour is said to have become increasingly concerning to ICC officials.

A source familiar with Bensouda’s accounts of the final two meetings with Cohen said he had raised questions about her security, and that of her family, in a manner that led her to believe he was threatening her.

On one occasion, Cohen is said to have shown Bensouda copies of photographs of her husband, which were taken covertly when the couple were visiting London. On another, according to sources, Cohen suggested to the prosecutor that a decision to open a full investigation would be detrimental to her career.

Four sources familiar with the situation said it was around the same time that Bensouda and other ICC officials discovered that information was circulating among diplomatic channels relating to her husband, who worked as an international affairs consultant.

Between 2019 and 2020, the Mossad had been actively seeking compromising information on the prosecutor and took an interest in her family members.

The spy agency obtained a cache of material, including transcripts of an apparent sting operation against her husband.

It is unclear who conducted the operation, or precisely what he is alleged to have said in the recordings. One possibility is that he had been targeted by the intelligence agency or by private actors of another country that wanted leverage over the ICC. Another possibility is the information was fabricated.

Once in the possession of Israel, however, the material was used by its diplomats in an unsuccessful attempt to undermine the chief prosecutor. But according to multiple sources, Israel failed to convince its allies of the significance of the material.

Three sources briefed on the information shared by Israel at a diplomatic level described the efforts as part of an unsuccessful “smear campaign” against Bensouda. “They went after Fatou,” one source said, but it had “no impact” on the prosecutor’s work.

The diplomatic efforts were part of a coordinated effort by the governments of Netanyahu and Donald Trump in the US to place public and private pressure on the prosecutor and her staff.

Between 2019 and 2020, in an unprecedented decision, the Trump administration imposed visa restrictions and sanctions on the chief prosecutor. The move was in retaliation to Bensouda’s pursuit of a separate investigation into war crimes in Afghanistan, allegedly committed by the Taliban and both Afghan and US military personnel.

However, Mike Pompeo, then US secretary of state, linked the sanctions package to the Palestine case. “It’s clear the ICC is only putting Israel in [its] crosshairs for nakedly political purposes,” he said.

Months later, he accused Bensouda, without citing any evidence, of having “engaged in corrupt acts for her personal benefit”.

The US sanctions were rescinded after President Joe Biden entered the White House.

In February 2021, the ICC’s pre-trial chamber issued a ruling confirming the ICC had jurisdiction in occupied Palestinian territories. The following month, Bensouda announced the opening of the criminal investigation.

“In the end, our central concern must be for the victims of crimes, both Palestinian and Israeli, arising from the long cycle of violence and insecurity that has caused deep suffering and despair on all sides,” she said at the time.

Bensouda completed her nine-year term at the ICC three months later, leaving it to her successor, Khan, to take up the investigation. It was only after the Hamas attacks on Israel on 7 October and the ensuing war on Gaza that the ICC’s investigation gained renewed urgency, culminating in last week’s request for arrest warrants.

It was the conclusion Israel’s political, military and intelligence establishment had feared. “The fact they chose the head of Mossad to be the prime minister’s unofficial messenger to [Bensouda] was to intimidate, by definition,” said a source briefed on Cohen’s operation. “It failed.”

 

This is the meat of the Gaurdian's investigation. It's very long but provides all the details. Their efforts were (are) systematic and widespread, and of course, Trump was happy to get involved when he was president.

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Spying, hacking and intimidation: Israel’s nine-year ‘war’ on the ICC exposed

When the chief prosecutor of the international criminal court (ICC) announced he was seeking arrest warrants against Israeli and Hamas leaders, he issued a cryptic warning: “I insist that all attempts to impede, intimidate or improperly influence the officials of this court must cease immediately.”

Karim Khan did not provide specific details of attempts to interfere in the ICC’s work, but he noted a clause in the court’s foundational treaty that made any such interference a criminal offence. If the conduct continued, he added, “my office will not hesitate to act”.

The prosecutor did not say who had attempted to intervene in the administration of justice, or how exactly they had done so.

Now, an investigation by the Guardian and the Israeli-based magazines +972 and Local Call can reveal how Israel has run an almost decade-long secret “war” against the court. The country deployed its intelligence agencies to surveil, hack, pressure, smear and allegedly threaten senior ICC staff in an effort to derail the court’s inquiries.

Israeli intelligence captured the communications of numerous ICC officials, including Khan and his predecessor as prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, intercepting phone calls, messages, emails and documents.

The surveillance was ongoing in recent months, providing Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, with advance knowledge of the prosecutor’s intentions. A recent intercepted communication suggested that Khan wanted to issue arrest warrants against Israelis but was under “tremendous pressure from the United States”, according to a source familiar with its contents.

Bensouda, who as chief prosecutor opened the ICC’s investigation in 2021, paving the way for last week’s announcement, was also spied on and allegedly threatened.

Netanyahu has taken a close interest in the intelligence operations against the ICC, and was described by one intelligence source as being “obsessed” with intercepts about the case. Overseen by his national security advisers, the efforts involved the domestic spy agency, the Shin Bet, as well as the military’s intelligence directorate, Aman, and cyber-intelligence division, Unit 8200. Intelligence gleaned from intercepts was, sources said, disseminated to government ministries of justice, foreign affairs and strategic affairs.

A covert operation against Bensouda, revealed on Tuesday by the Guardian, was run personally by Netanyahu’s close ally Yossi Cohen, who was at the time the director of Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad. At one stage, the spy chief even enlisted the help of the then president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Joseph Kabila.

Details of Israel’s nine-year campaign to thwart the ICC’s inquiry have been uncovered by the Guardian, an Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and Local Call, a Hebrew-language outlet.

The joint investigation draws on interviews with more than two dozen current and former Israeli intelligence officers and government officials, senior ICC figures, diplomats and lawyers familiar with the ICC case and Israel’s efforts to undermine it.

Contacted by the Guardian, a spokesperson for the ICC said it was aware of “proactive intelligence-gathering activities being undertaken by a number of national agencies hostile towards the court”. They said the ICC was continually implementing countermeasures against such activity, and that “none of the recent attacks against it by national intelligence agencies” had penetrated the court’s core evidence holdings, which had remained secure.

A spokesperson for Israel’s prime minister’s office said: “The questions forwarded to us are replete with many false and unfounded allegations meant to hurt the state of Israel.” A military spokesperson added: “The IDF [Israel Defense Forces] did not and does not conduct surveillance or other intelligence operations against the ICC.”

Since it was established in 2002, the ICC has served as a permanent court of last resort for the prosecution of individuals accused of some of the world’s worst atrocities. It has charged the former Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, the late Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi and most recently, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.

Khan’s decision to seek warrants against Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, along with Hamas leaders implicated in the 7 October attack, marks the first time an ICC prosecutor has sought arrest warrants against the leader of a close western ally.

The allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity that Khan has levelled against Netanyahu and Gallant all relate to Israel’s eight-month war in Gaza, which according to the territory’s health authority has killed more than 35,000 people.

But the ICC case has been a decade in the making, inching forward amid rising alarm among Israeli officials at the possibility of arrest warrants, which would prevent those accused from travelling to any of the court’s 124 member states for fear of arrest.

It is this spectre of prosecutions in The Hague that one former Israeli intelligence official said had led the “entire military and political establishment” to regard the counteroffensive against the ICC “as a war that had to be waged, and one that Israel needed to be defended against. It was described in military terms.”

That “war” commenced in January 2015, when it was confirmed that Palestine would join the court after it was recognised as a state by the UN general assembly. Its accession was condemned by Israeli officials as a form of “diplomatic terrorism”.

One former defence official familiar with Israel’s counter-ICC effort said joining the court had been “perceived as the crossing of a red line” and “perhaps the most aggressive” diplomatic move taken by the Palestinian Authority, which governs the West Bank. “To be recognised as a state in the UN is nice,” they added. “But the ICC is a mechanism with teeth.”

A hand-delivered threat
For Fatou Bensouda, a respected Gambian lawyer who was elected the ICC’s chief prosecutor in 2012, the accession of Palestine to the court brought with it a momentous decision. Under the Rome statute, the treaty that established the court, the ICC can exercise its jurisdiction only over crimes within member states or by nationals of those states.

Israel, like the US, Russia and China, is not a member. After Palestine’s acceptance as an ICC member, any alleged war crimes – committed by those of any nationality – in occupied Palestinian territories now fell under Bensouda’s jurisdiction.

On 16 January 2015, within weeks of Palestine joining, Bensouda opened a preliminary examination into what in the legalese of the court was called “the situation in Palestine”. The following month, two men who had managed to obtain the prosecutor’s private address turned up at her home in The Hague.

Sources familiar with the incident said the men declined to identify themselves when they arrived, but said they wanted to hand-deliver a letter to Bensouda on behalf of an unknown German woman who wanted to thank her. The envelope contained hundreds of dollars in cash and a note with an Israeli phone number.

Sources with knowledge of an ICC review into the incident said that while it was not possible to identify the men, or fully establish their motives, it was concluded that Israel was likely to be signalling to the prosecutor that it knew where she lived. The ICC reported the incident to Dutch authorities and put in place additional security, installing CCTV cameras at her home.

The ICC’s preliminary inquiry in the Palestinian territories was one of several such fact-finding exercises the court was undertaking at the time, as a precursor to a possible full investigation. Bensouda’s caseload also included nine full investigations, including into events in DRC, Kenya and the Darfur region of Sudan.

Officials in the prosecutor’s office believed the court was vulnerable to espionage activity and introduced countersurveillance measures to protect their confidential inquiries.

In Israel, the prime minister’s national security council (NSC) had mobilised a response involving its intelligence agencies. Netanyahu and some of the generals and spy chiefs who authorised the operation had a personal stake in its outcome.

Unlike the international court of justice (ICJ), a UN body that deals with the legal responsibility of nation states, the ICC is a criminal court that prosecutes individuals, targeting those deemed most responsible for atrocities.

Multiple Israeli sources said the leadership of the IDF wanted military intelligence to join the effort, which was being led by other spy agencies, to ensure senior officers could be protected from charges. “We were told that senior officers are afraid to accept positions in the West Bank because they are afraid of being prosecuted in The Hague,” one source recalled.

Two intelligence officials involved in procuring intercepts about the ICC said the prime minister’s office took a keen interest in their work. Netanyahu’s office, one said, would send “areas of interests” and “instructions” in relation to the monitoring of court officials. Another described the prime minister as “obsessed” with intercepts shedding light on the activities of the ICC.

Hacked emails and monitored calls
Five sources familiar with Israel’s intelligence activities said it routinely spied on the phone calls made by Bensouda and her staff with Palestinians. Blocked by Israel from accessing Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, the ICC was forced to conduct much of its research by telephone, which made it more susceptible to surveillance.

Thanks to their comprehensive access to Palestinian telecoms infrastructure, the sources said, intelligence operatives could capture the calls without installing spyware on the ICC official’s devices.

“If Fatou Bensouda spoke to any person in the West Bank or Gaza, then that phone call would enter [intercept] systems,” one source said. Another said there was no hesitation internally over spying on the prosecutor, adding: “With Bensouda, she’s black and African, so who cares?”

The surveillance system did not capture calls between ICC officials and anyone outside Palestine. However, multiple sources said the system required the active selection of the overseas phone numbers of ICC officials whose calls Israeli intelligence agencies decided to listen to.

According to one Israeli source, a large whiteboard in an Israeli intelligence department contained the names of about 60 people under surveillance – half of them Palestinians and half from other countries, including UN officials and ICC personnel.

In The Hague, Bensouda and her senior staff were alerted by security advisers and via diplomatic channels that Israel was monitoring their work. A former senior ICC official recalled: “We were made aware they were trying to get information on where we were with the preliminary examination.”

Officials also became aware of specific threats against a prominent Palestinian NGO, Al-Haq, which was one of several Palestinian human rights groups that frequently submitted information to the ICC inquiry, often in lengthy documents detailing incidents it wanted the prosecutor to consider. The Palestinian Authority submitted similar dossiers.

Such documents often contain sensitive information such as testimony from potential witnesses. Al-Haq’s submissions are also understood to have linked specific allegations of Rome statute crimes to senior officials, including chiefs of the IDF, directors of the Shin Bet, and defence ministers such as Benny Gantz.

Years later, after the ICC had opened a full investigation into the Palestine case, Gantz designated Al-Haq and five other Palestinian rights groups as “terrorist organisations”, a label that was rejected by multiple European states and later found by the CIA to be unsupported by evidence. The organisations said the designations were a “targeted assault” against those most actively engaging with the ICC.

According to multiple current and former intelligence officials, military cyber-offensive teams and the Shin Bet both systematically monitored the employees of Palestinian NGOs and the Palestinian Authority who were engaging with the ICC. Two intelligence sources described how Israeli operatives hacked into the emails of Al-Haq and other groups communicating with Bensouda’s office.

One of the sources said the Shin Bet even installed Pegasus spyware, developed by the private-sector NSO Group, on the phones of multiple Palestinian NGO employees, as well as two senior Palestinian Authority officials.

Keeping tabs on the Palestinian submissions to the ICC’s inquiry was viewed as part of the Shin Bet’s mandate, but some army officials were concerned that spying on a foreign civilian entity crossed a line, as it had little to do with military operations.

“It has nothing to do with Hamas, it has nothing to do with stability in the West Bank,” one military source said of the ICC surveillance. Another added: “We used our resources to spy on Fatou Bensouda – this isn’t something legitimate to do as military intelligence.”

Secret meetings with the ICC
Legitimate or otherwise, the surveillance of the ICC and Palestinians making the case for prosecutions against Israelis provided the Israeli government with an advantage in a secret back channel it had opened with the prosecutor’s office.

Israel’s meetings with the ICC were highly sensitive: if made public, they had the potential to undermine the government’s official position that it did not recognise the court’s authority.

According to six sources familiar with the meetings, they consisted of a delegation of top government lawyers and diplomats who travelled to The Hague. Two of the sources said the meetings were authorised by Netanyahu.

The Israeli delegation was drawn from the justice ministry, foreign ministry and the military advocate general’s office. The meetings took place between 2017 and 2019, and were led by the prominent Israeli lawyer and diplomat Tal Becker.

“In the beginning it was tense,” recalled a former ICC official. “We would get into details of specific incidents. We’d say: ‘We’re receiving allegations about these attacks, these killings,’ and they would provide us with information.”

A person with direct knowledge of Israel’s preparation for the back-channel meetings said officials in the justice ministry were furnished with intelligence that had been gleaned from Israeli surveillance intercepts before delegations arrived at The Hague. “The lawyers who dealt with the issue at the justice ministry had a big thirst for intelligence information,” they said.

For the Israelis, the back-channel meetings, while sensitive, presented a unique opportunity to directly present legal arguments challenging the prosecutor’s jurisdiction over the Palestinian territories.

They also sought to convince the prosecutor that, despite the Israeli military’s highly questionable record of investigating wrongdoing in its ranks, it had robust procedures for holding its armed forces to account.

This was a critical issue for Israel. A core ICC principle, known as complementarity, prevents the prosecutor from investigating or trying individuals if they are the subject of credible state-level investigations or criminal proceedings.

Israeli surveillance operatives were asked to find out which specific incidents might form part of a future ICC prosecution, multiple sources said, in order to enable Israeli investigative bodies to “open investigations retroactively” in the same cases.

“If materials were transferred to the ICC, we had to understand exactly what they were, to ensure that the IDF investigated them independently and sufficiently so that they could claim complementarity,” one source explained.

Israel’s back-channel meetings with the ICC ended in December 2019, when Bensouda, announcing the end of her preliminary examination, said she believed there was a “reasonable basis” to conclude that Israel and Palestinian armed groups had both committed war crimes in the occupied territories.

It was a significant setback for Israel’s leaders, although it could have been worse. In a move that some in the government regarded as a partial vindication of Israel’s lobbying efforts, Bensouda stopped short of launching a formal investigation.

Instead, she announced she would ask a panel of ICC judges to rule on the contentious question of the court’s jurisdiction over the Palestinian territories, due to “unique and highly contested legal and factual issues”.

Yet Bensouda had made clear she was minded to open a full investigation if the judges gave her the green light. It was against this backdrop that Israel ramped up its campaign against the ICC and turned to its top spy chief to turn up the heat on Bensouda personally.

Personal threats and a ‘smear campaign’
Between late 2019 and early 2021, as the pre-trial chamber considered the jurisdictional questions, the director of the Mossad, Yossi Cohen, intensified his efforts to persuade Bensouda not to proceed with the investigation.

Cohen’s contacts with Bensouda – which were described to the Guardian by four people familiar with the prosecutor’s contemporaneous accounts of the interactions, as well as sources briefed on the Mossad operation – had begun several years earlier.

In one of the earliest encounters, Cohen surprised Bensouda when he made an unexpected appearance at an official meeting the prosecutor was holding with the then DRC president, Joseph Kabila, in a New York hotel suite.

Sources familiar with the meeting said that after Bensouda’s staff were asked to leave the room, the director of the Mossad suddenly appeared from behind a door in a carefully choreographed “ambush”.

After the incident in New York, Cohen persisted in contacting the prosecutor, turning up unannounced and subjecting her to unwanted calls. While initially amicable, the sources said, Cohen’s behaviour became increasingly threatening and intimidating.

A close ally of Netanyahu at the time, Cohen was a veteran Mossad spymaster and had gained a reputation within the service as a skilled recruiter of agents with experience cultivating high-level officials in foreign governments.

Accounts of his secret meetings with Bensouda paint a picture in which he sought to “build a relationship” with the prosecutor as he attempted to dissuade her from pursuing an investigation that, if it went ahead, could embroil senior Israeli officials.

Three sources briefed on Cohen’s activities said they understood the spy chief had tried to recruit Bensouda into complying with Israel’s demands during the period in which she was waiting for a ruling from the pre-trial chamber.

They said he became more threatening after he began to realise the prosecutor would not be persuaded to abandon the investigation. At one stage, Cohen is said to have made comments about Bensouda’s security and thinly veiled threats about the consequences for her career if she proceeded. Contacted by the Guardian, Cohen and Kabila did not respond to requests for comment. Bensouda declined to comment.

When she was prosecutor, Bensouda formally disclosed her encounters with Cohen to a small group within the ICC, with the intention of putting on record her belief that she had been “personally threatened”, sources familiar with the disclosures said.

This was not the only way Israel sought to place pressure on the prosecutor. At around the same time, ICC officials discovered details of what sources described as a diplomatic “smear campaign”, relating in part to a close family member.

According to multiple sources, the Mossad had obtained a cache of material including transcripts of an apparent sting operation against Bensouda’s husband. The origins of the material – and whether it was genuine – remain unclear.

However, elements of the information were circulated by Israel among western diplomatic officials, sources said, in a failed attempt to discredit the chief prosecutor. A person briefed on the campaign said it gained little traction among diplomats and amounted to a desperate attempt to “besmirch” Bensouda’s reputation.

Trump’s campaign against the ICC
In March 2020, three months after Bensouda referred the Palestine case to the pre-trial chamber, an Israeli government delegation reportedly held discussions in Washington with senior US officials about “a joint Israeli-American struggle” against the ICC.

One Israeli intelligence official said they regarded Donald Trump’s administration as more cooperative than that of his Democratic predecessor. The Israelis felt sufficiently comfortable to ask for information from US intelligence about Bensouda, a request the source said would have been “impossible” during Barack Obama’s tenure.

Days before the meetings in Washington, Bensouda had received authorisation from the ICC’s judges to pursue a separate investigation into war crimes in Afghanistan committed by the Taliban and both Afghan and US military personnel.

Fearing US armed forces would be prosecuted, the Trump administration was engaged in its own aggressive campaign against the ICC, culminating in the summer of 2020 with the imposition of US economic sanctions on Bensouda and one of her top officials.

Among ICC officials, the US-led financial and visa restrictions on court personnel were believed to relate as much to the Palestine investigation as to the Afghanistan case. Two former ICC officials said senior Israeli officials had expressly indicated to them that Israel and the US were working together.

At a press conference in June that year, senior Trump administration figures signalled their intention to impose sanctions on ICC officials, announcing they had received unspecified information about “financial corruption and malfeasance at the highest levels of the office of the prosecutor”.

As well as referring to the Afghanistan case, Mike Pompeo, Trump’s secretary of state, linked the US measures to the Palestine case. “It’s clear the ICC is only putting Israel in [its] crosshairs for nakedly political purposes,” he said. Months later, Pompeo accused Bensouda of having “engaged in corrupt acts for her personal benefit”.

The US has never publicly provided any information to substantiate that charge, and Joe Biden lifted the sanctions months after he entered the White House.

But at the time Bensouda faced increasing pressure from an apparently concerted effort behind the scenes by the two powerful allies. As a Gambian national, she did not enjoy the political protection that other ICC colleagues from western countries had by virtue of their citizenship. A former ICC source said this left her “vulnerable and isolated”.

Cohen’s activities, sources said, were particularly concerning for the prosecutor and led her to fear for her personal safety. When the pre-trial chamber finally confirmed the ICC had jurisdiction in Palestine in February 2021, some at the ICC even believed Bensouda should leave the final decision to open a full investigation to her successor.

On 3 March, however, months before the end of her nine-year term, Bensouda announced a full investigation in the Palestine case, setting in motion a process that could lead to criminal charges, though she cautioned the next phase could take time.

“Any investigation undertaken by the office will be conducted independently, impartially and objectively, without fear or favour,” she said. “To both Palestinian and Israeli victims and affected communities, we urge patience.”

Khan announces arrest warrants
When Khan took the helm at the ICC prosecutor’s office in June 2021, he inherited an investigation he later said “lies on the San Andreas fault of international politics and strategic interests”.

As he took office, other investigations – including on events in the Philippines, DRC, Afghanistan and Bangladesh – competed for his attention, and in March 2022, days after Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, he opened a high-profile investigation into alleged Russian war crimes.

Initially, the politically sensitive Palestine inquiry was not treated as a priority by the British prosecutor’s team, sources familiar with the case said. One said it was in effect “on the shelf” – but Khan’s office disputes this and says it established a dedicated investigative team to take the inquiry forward.

In Israel, the government’s top lawyers regarded Khan – who had previously defended warlords such as the former Liberian president Charles Taylor – as a more cautious prosecutor than Bensouda. One former senior Israeli official said there was “lots of respect” for Khan, unlike for his predecessor. His appointment to the court was viewed as a “reason for optimism”, they said, but they added that the 7 October attack “changed that reality”.

The Hamas assault on southern Israel, in which Palestinian militants killed nearly 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped about 250 people, clearly involved brazen war crimes. So, too, in the view of many legal experts, has Israel’s subsequent onslaught on Gaza, which is estimated to have killed more than 35,000 people and brought the territory to the brink of famine through Israel’s obstruction of humanitarian aid.

By the end of the third week of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, Khan was on the ground at the Rafah border crossing. He subsequently made visits to the West Bank and southern Israel, where he was invited to meet survivors of the 7 October attack and the relatives of people who had been killed.

In February 2024, Khan issued a strongly worded statement that Netanyahu’s legal advisers interpreted as an ominous sign. In the post on X, he in effect warned Israel against launching an assault on Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, where more than 1 million displaced people were sheltering at the time.

“I am deeply concerned by the reported bombardment and potential ground incursion by Israeli forces in Rafah,” he wrote. “Those who do not comply with the law should not complain later when my office takes action.”

The comments stirred alarm within the Israeli government as they appeared to deviate from his previous statements about the war, which officials had viewed as reassuringly cautious. “That tweet surprised us a lot,” a senior official said.

Concerns in Israel over Khan’s intentions escalated last month when the government briefed the media that it believed the prosecutor was contemplating arrest warrants against Netanyahu and other senior officials such as Yoav Gallant.

Israeli intelligence had intercepted emails, attachments and text messages from Khan and other officials in his office. “The subject of the ICC climbed the ladder of priorities for Israeli intelligence,” one intelligence source said.

It was via intercepted communications that Israel established that Khan was at one stage considering entering Gaza through Egypt and wanted urgent assistance doing so “without Israel’s permission”.

Another Israeli intelligence assessment, circulated widely in the intelligence community, drew on surveillance of a call between two Palestinian politicians. One of them said Khan had indicated that a request for arrest warrants of Israeli leaders could be imminent, but warned he was “under tremendous pressure from the United States”.

It was against this backdrop that Netanyahu made a series of public statements warning a request for arrest warrants could be imminent. He called on “the leaders of the free world to stand firmly against the ICC” and “use all the means at their disposal to stop this dangerous move”.

He added: “Branding Israel’s leaders and soldiers as war criminals will pour jet fuel on the fires of antisemitism.” In Washington, a group of senior US Republican senators had already sent a threatening letter to Khan with a clear warning: “Target Israel and we will target you.”

The ICC, meanwhile, has strengthened its security with regular sweeps of the prosecutor’s offices, security checks on devices, phone-free areas, weekly threat assessments and the introduction of specialist equipment. An ICC spokesperson said Khan’s office had been subjected to “several forms of threats and communications that could be viewed as attempts to unduly influence its activities”.

Khan recently disclosed in an interview with CNN that some elected leaders had been “very blunt” with him as he prepared to issue arrest warrants. “‘This court is built for Africa and for thugs like Putin,’ is was what a senior leader told me.”

Despite the pressure, Khan, like his predecessor in the prosecutor’s office, chose to press ahead. Last week, Khan announced he was seeking arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant alongside three Hamas leaders for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

He said Israel’s prime minister and defence minister stood accused of responsibility for extermination, starvation, the denial of humanitarian relief supplies and deliberate targeting of civilians.

Standing at a lectern with two of his top prosecutors – one American, the other British – at his side, Khan said he had repeatedly told Israel to take urgent action to comply with humanitarian law.

“I specifically underlined that starvation as a method of war and the denial of humanitarian relief constitute Rome statute offences. I could not have been clearer,” he said. “As I also repeatedly underlined in my public statements, those who do not comply with the law should not complain later when my office takes action. That day has come.”

 

Jeffery Epstein did not kill himself. 

[bolverk 29694]

Smotrich admits that the plan is to all but annex the West Bank. Well, duh, that's been apparent for decades, but now, Israeli right-wingers are brazen enough to concede they've been lying all along and have, indeed, never negotiated in good faith. Every deal they ever offered was full of poison pills.

 

Israeli Official Describes Secret Government Bid to Cement Control of West Bank
Israeli judges have long ruled that Israel’s control of the territory is a temporary military occupation and complies with international law. A powerful minister’s recent speech, caught on tape, suggested the government is trying to change that.

An influential member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition told settlers in the Israeli-occupied West Bank that the government is engaged in a stealthy effort to irreversibly change the way the territory is governed, to cement Israel’s control over it without being accused of formally annexing it.

In a taped recording of the speech, the official, Bezalel Smotrich, can be heard suggesting at a private event earlier this month that the goal was to prevent the West Bank from becoming part of a Palestinian state.

“I’m telling you, it’s mega-dramatic,” Mr. Smotrich told the settlers. “Such changes change a system’s DNA.”

While Mr. Smotrich’s opposition to ceding control over the West Bank is no secret, the Israeli government’s official position is that the West Bank’s status remains open to negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian leaders. Israel’s Supreme Court has ruled that Israel’s rule over the territory amounts to a temporary military occupation overseen by army generals, not a permanent civilian annexation administered by Israeli civil servants.

Mr. Smotrich’s June 9 speech at a West Bank gathering may make that posture harder to maintain. In it, he outlined a carefully orchestrated program [NEXT POST] to take authority over the West Bank out of the hands of the Israeli military and turn it over to civilians working for Mr. Smotrich in the defense ministry. Parts of the plan have already been incrementally introduced over the past 18 months, and some authorities have already been transferred to civilians.

“We created a separate civilian system,” Mr. Smotrich said. To deflect international scrutiny, the government has allowed the defense ministry to remain involved in the process, he said, so that it seems that the military is still at the heart of West Bank governance.

“It will be easier to swallow in the international and legal context,” Mr. Smotrich said. “So that they won’t say that we are doing annexation here.”

Reporters for The New York Times listened to a roughly half-hour recording of the speech that was provided by one of the attendees, a researcher from Peace Now, an anti-occupation campaign group. The researcher shared a recording of the entire speech. A spokesman for Mr. Smotrich, Eytan Fold, confirmed he gave the speech and said the event was not a secret.

Mr. Smotrich, a far-right lawmaker, said Mr. Netanyahu was aware of the details of the plan, much of which was foreshadowed in a coalition agreement between their parties that allows the prime minister to remain in power. Mr. Netanyahu is “with us full on,” Mr. Smotrich said in the speech.

If the government collapses, a future coalition could reverse the changes, but government moves in the West Bank have, in the past, usually remained in place through successive administrations.

For many Palestinians, the speech itself is likely to be greeted with less surprise than the fact that Mr. Smotrich said the words aloud.

“It’s interesting to hear Smotrich in his own voice confirm much of what we suspected about his agenda,” said Ibrahim Dalalsha, director of the Horizon Center, a political analysis group in Ramallah, West Bank.

Still, Mr. Dalalsha said, the approach is not new.

Palestinians have said for years that Israeli leaders are trying to annex the West Bank in all but name, building settlements in strategic locations in a bid to prevent contiguous Palestinian control across the territory. “It’s been going on since 1967,” said Mr. Dalalsha. “Since way before Smotrich came to the scene,” he added.

cont'd

Spoiler

Israel seized control of the territory from Jordan in 1967 during a war with three Arab states. Since occupying it, Israel has settled more than 500,000 Israeli civilians, who are subject to Israeli civil law, alongside the territory’s roughly three million Palestinians, who are subject to Israeli military law. Roughly 40 percent of the territory is administered by the Palestinian Authority, a semiautonomous Palestinian-run body that relies on the Israel’s cooperation for much of its funding.

For decades, Israel’s Supreme Court has described Israel’s rule over the territory as a military occupation, overseen by a senior general, that complies with the international laws that apply to occupied territories. The current ruling coalition disputes the term “occupation,” but it also publicly denies the West Bank has been permanently annexed and placed under the sovereign control of Israel’s civilian authorities.

“The final status of these territories will be determined by the parties in direct negotiations,” the prime minister’s office said in a statement in response to Mr. Smotrich’s speech. “This policy has not changed,” the statement added.

Mr. Smotrich’s speech suggested otherwise.

In particular, he pointed to one change under which military officers no longer oversee most of the process by which Israeli settlements are expanded, land is expropriated and roads are built in the West Bank. Those roles are now overseen by “a civilian working under the defense ministry” who does not work for military commanders, he said, but in a new directorate that Mr. Smotrich supervises.

Even as international pressure grows to declare a Palestinian state that would encompass the West Bank and Gaza, Mr. Smotrich’s comments suggest that Israel is quietly working to firm up its control over the West Bank and make it harder to disentangle from Israeli control.

Diplomats have been trying to reach a “grand deal” for the Middle East that would both end the Israeli war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip and improve Israel’s ties with other nations in the region. Saudi Arabia, for one, says it will recognize Israel — but only if Israel in turn permits Palestinian statehood.

Mr. Smotrich’s speech suggests just how distant that prospect may be as he moves to merge governance of the occupied West Bank with governance of the state of Israel.

Mr. Smotrich’s speech “fundamentally undermines the longstanding argument of the state of Israel that the settlements are legal because they are temporary,” said Talia Sasson, a former senior official in Israel’s justice ministry who led an influential government inquiry in 2005 into the government’s support for illegal settlements.

The speech made clear just how powerful Israel’s once-marginal settler movement has become.

Mr. Smotrich is a longtime settler activist who once worked outside the Israeli establishment to build settlement encampments that are considered illegal even under Israeli law. As a religious hard-liner, he believes the West Bank — which Israelis refer to by its biblical names, Judea and Samaria — was given to Jews by God.

As a lawmaker over the past decade, Mr. Smotrich attracted attention for regularly making extremist comments, including his call to destroy a Palestinian town; his support for segregation between Arabs and Jews in maternity wards; and his backing for Jewish landowners who will not sell property to Arabs.

Since late 2022, Mr. Smotrich has gained extraordinary influence over government policy. That is when his party joined Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition, helping it secure a small majority in Parliament.

Mr. Smotrich used that leverage to persuade Mr. Netanyahu to assign him both the position in the defense ministry as well as the finance ministry, a role that Mr. Smotrich has used to block funds for the Palestinian Authority.

“My goal — and I think of everyone here — is to first and foremost prevent the establishment of a terror state in the very heart of the land of Israel,” Mr. Smotrich said in the recorded speech.

Mr. Smotrich said his main achievement has been to place many of the military’s duties in the West Bank under civilian control. While the army has often turned a blind eye to settlement expansion and even guards unauthorized settlements from Palestinian attack, soldiers have also sometimes destroyed settler encampments built without government permission and barred Israeli activists from entering the West Bank.

To counteract that influence, Mr. Smotrich said, the government has:

• Given civilians greater control over settlement construction plans as well as oversight over the lawyers who decide legal issues in the settlements.
• Stripped the army’s top commander in the West Bank of the ability to block settlement construction plans.
• Secured nearly $270 million from Israel’s defense budget to guard settlements in 2024-2025.
• Moved closer to establishing a new security squad that could more speedily demolish Palestinian buildings in the West Bank that have been built without Israeli permission.

To some extent, Mr. Smotrich’s comments appeared to be an attempt to defuse criticism from his own base about his record in office. Settler activists say that the military still too often stops them from building new settlement outposts, and that Mr. Smotrich has not done enough to intervene.

“Fifteen years ago, I was one of those running on the hills, erecting tents,” Mr. Smotrich told the settlers in his speech. Now, he said that his behind-the-scenes work will have far more impact than the construction of any single settlement encampment.

 

Edited June 21 by bolverk

[bolverk 29694]

A quiet administrative change advances a far-right Israeli minister’s effort to control the West Bank.

Israel is putting key responsibilities in the occupied West Bank under an administrator who answers to a hard-line government minister, Bezalel Smotrich, who favors annexation of the territory, in what analysts and human rights activists describe as the latest step toward the far right’s aim of expanding Israeli settlements there.

The administrative move has been a longtime goal of Mr. Smotrich, the finance minister and settler leader, and increases his formal authority over many areas of civilian life, including building and demolition permits, a crucial tool for settlers who view construction as a way to strengthen their grip on the West Bank.

It is the latest of several changes over the past two years that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, the most right-wing in Israel’s history, has made to the way that the West Bank is ruled. Since early 2023, the government has eased the planning process for new settlements and gradually transferred more powers from the defense minister, Yoav Gallant, to Mr. Smotrich, a longtime settler activist who wants to prevent the possibility of creating a Palestinian state in the territory.

The moves stop short of fully placing the West Bank under civilian control, and they have limited effect in the 40 percent of the West Bank that is administered by the Palestinian Authority, a semi-autonomous Palestinian-run body. But critics say that they collectively take Israel a step closer to annexing the territory in all but name.

For decades, Israel has defended its control of the territory there by saying that it is a temporary military occupation since the 1967 war that complies with the international laws applicable to occupied territories, rather than a permanent annexation that places the West Bank under the sovereign control of Israel’s civilian authorities. But the empowerment of Mr. Smotrich, a civilian minister, tests that argument to its limits.

The latest move, which creates a civilian head of an area previously overseen only by the military, was finalized by the Israeli military on May 29, according to copies of two military orders seen by The New York Times. It names a deputy head of the civil administration in the West Bank who will answer to Mr. Smotrich, an ultranationalist member of Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition who has a broad portfolio in the West Bank.

Settlers like Mr. Smotrich want to build more Israeli settlements across the West Bank on land that Palestinians hoped would be the core of a future Palestinian state. While previous Israeli governments and generals have built and protected hundreds of settlements, the latest order would likely accelerate that process, analysts and activists said.

Critics have already accused the government of failing to clamp down on illegal settlement construction and violence committed by settlers, and of thwarting measures to enforce the law.

Since the war began in October, the government has cracked down on the territory with near-daily military raids it says are aimed at terrorists. The government has also emboldened settlers and enacted new regulations that have put additional economic pressure on Palestinians.

“We are speaking about a change with a very clear political dimension to permit all kinds of plans for building settlements very quickly and without any obstacles,” said Michael Milshtein, an author and expert in Palestinian studies at Tel Aviv University.

The military has for decades been responsible for civil administration in most of the West Bank as well as for security, and critics say the shift to civilian administration, a longstanding aim of Mr. Smotrich, ties decision-making more closely to Israeli domestic politics. Analysts noted, however, that Defense Minister Yoav Gallant would retain input and could block certain measures.

Aviv Tatarsky, a researcher at Ir Amim, an Israeli nongovernmental organization, said that the order was “historic,” because “for the first time you have in a formal way management in the West Bank that is not done through the army but through the Israeli civil political system.”

The civilian political influence over the military administration already existed to some extent, though it was hidden from view, he said, “but now it’s stopped playing the games.”

A spokesman for Mr. Smotrich did not respond to a request for comment.

The person named to fill the new administrative post, Hillel Roth, is a settler and a member of the religious nationalist community who will likely act to facilitate Mr. Smotrich’s agenda, analysts said.

Mr. Milshtein noted that Mr. Smotrich had separately aimed to weaken the Palestinian Authority, which administers some parts of the West Bank. Mr. Smotrich announced in May that Israel would withhold revenue from the authority, worsening its severe fiscal crisis. In June, Mr. Smotrich said that he had ordered about $35 million in tax revenue that Israel collected on behalf of the authority to be diverted to the families of Israeli victims of terrorism.

Since Israel occupied the West Bank, previously controlled by Jordan, in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the government has encouraged Jews to settle there, providing land, military protection, electricity, water and roads. More than 500,000 settlers now live among 2.7 million Palestinians in the territory.

Most of the world considers the settlements illegal. Some Israeli Jews justify settlement on religious grounds, others on the basis of history — both ancient and modern — while some say Israel must control the territory to prevent armed Palestinian groups from taking power.

[tx 3 putt 77205]

 

[Brian Fantana 6689]

Yeah this'll end well for everyone involved for sure.

Israel doesn't have the money or the munitions to sustain a conflct just in Gaza, let alone a war on 3 separate fronts, at least. Which means we will be funding their war almost entirely. Love to see my tax dollars spent to start a 3rd world war.

Edited June 22 by Brian Fantana

[Anastasis 23479]

Debate next week gonna be fun watching us presidential candidates try to break their own backs. 

[Bullneck 19185]

3 hours ago, Brian Fantana said:

Yeah this'll end well for everyone involved for sure.

Israel doesn't have the money or the munitions to sustain a conflct just in Gaza, let alone a war on 3 separate fronts, at least. Which means we will be funding their war almost entirely. Love to see my tax dollars spent to start a 3rd world war.

https://www.jpost.com/israel-hamas-war/article-801582?utm_source=008f7a3ee6998e3ebc0b85c8246e3f3283&utm_medium=jpostbow&utm_campaign=00724afae6b7bea04750ef0bc13a79c0af&utm_adtitle=Body+of+Shani+Louk%2C+previously+paraded+around+Gaza%2C+retrieved+by+IDF&dicbo=v4-wY6SD9X-1075783007

I'm wondering why Hezbollah and Hamas hate Israel so much?  Or why they are such awful people.  

I don't agree with everything the Israeli government does but savagery like what you see in that article can't be tolerated.  You agree, right?

Edited June 22 by Bullneck

[Brian Fantana 6689]

50 minutes ago, Bullneck said:

https://www.jpost.com/israel-hamas-war/article-801582?utm_source=008f7a3ee6998e3ebc0b85c8246e3f3283&utm_medium=jpostbow&utm_campaign=00724afae6b7bea04750ef0bc13a79c0af&utm_adtitle=Body+of+Shani+Louk%2C+previously+paraded+around+Gaza%2C+retrieved+by+IDF&dicbo=v4-wY6SD9X-1075783007

I'm wondering why Hezbollah and Hamas hate Israel so much?  Or why they are such awful people.  

I don't agree with everything the Israeli government does but savagery like what you see in that article can't be tolerated.  You agree, right?

Do you even know what point you're trying to make or are you just looking for another shitty gotcha? Are we back to playing the Do You Condemn game again? What does this have to do with what I actually said in my post? Did my post say Hezbollah and Hamas were good? Really think about what you're trying to say to me instead of just seeing a "war bad" post and then vomiting out pro-Israeli talking points that don't actually have a fucking thing to do with what I posted.

I've said this plenty of times before, but Israel is more than welcome to wage whatever wars they'd like. It'd be nice if they weren't fully endorsed and paid for by the US government, by our tax dollars. You want to level Rafah? Fine, do it without our bombs or money. Want to wage war on two other fronts in Iran and Lebanon? Fine, do it without our bombs or money.

[Bullneck 19185]

1 hour ago, Brian Fantana said:

Do you even know what point you're trying to make or are you just looking for another shitty gotcha? Are we back to playing the Do You Condemn game again? What does this have to do with what I actually said in my post? Did my post say Hezbollah and Hamas were good? Really think about what you're trying to say to me instead of just seeing a "war bad" post and then vomiting out pro-Israeli talking points that don't actually have a fucking thing to do with what I posted.

I've said this plenty of times before, but Israel is more than welcome to wage whatever wars they'd like. It'd be nice if they weren't fully endorsed and paid for by the US government, by our tax dollars. You want to level Rafah? Fine, do it without our bombs or money. Want to wage war on two other fronts in Iran and Lebanon? Fine, do it without our bombs or money.

OK, so you're not up to it then?  You seem awfully touchy.

[Brian Fantana 6689]

55 minutes ago, Bullneck said:

OK, so you're not up to it then?  You seem awfully touchy.

What? Are you crazy? What are you even asking?